By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
I’ve recorded several podcasts, interviews, conversations recently.
At London Business School Maureen and I recorded Journeys, a conversation with Rajesh Chandy the Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Developing World at the Wheeler Institute. People seemed to enjoy it, someone suggested that we ‘looked like two teenagers our to start an exciting adventure,’ not business like at all.
With Tyrel Cameron Eskelson I talked on his Interlocutor podcast about my travel life, starting in Pakistan when I was a small child right up to travel in recent weeks and for the rest of 2025.
While I was travelling the islands of Kiribati – South Tarawa, North Tarawa and brief visits to a couple of outer islands – during November I read J Maarten Troost’s The Sex Lives of Cannibals, the perfect Kiribati (well mainly South Tarawa) book. You have to go a lon...
My visit to Kiribati featured North and South Tarawa, but it was was too short to explore any of the outer islands, you’d have to at least overnight and flights don’t operate every day. Plus you’d have to allow extra time, just in case weather or Air Kiribati malfunct...
▲ Having looked around crowded South Tarawa it was time to move to uncrowded North Tarawa. The road that runs from one end of South Tarawa (Betio) all the way to the other end (the airport at Bairiki) continues a bit further and then crosses a bridge to Buota, the fir...
In the British colonial era it was the Gilbert half of the Gilbert & Ellice Islands. Kiribati gained its independence in 1979, became a member of the United Nations in 1999 and has a population of 115,000. Over 50,000 of that population are crammed on to the strin...
I’ve just been at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Myanmar. I put a lot of thought into it before I went, assorted people told me I should not be going, that by turning up I was ignoring the ethnic cleansing or even genocide going on in the Rakhine area, the western...
Lonely Planet’s second Cities Book is about to hit the shelves. In the first edition, I came up with Ten Cities that Didn’t Make the Cut. Cities that for an assortment of reasons I found really important, interesting or inspiring, but didn’t feature in the book. Some ...
For all Trump’s bleating about trade agreements hitting American business the USA has some blatantly unfair trade restrictions which not only hit other countries’ businesses, but also damage the very country they’re supposed to protect, ie the USA. Starting with the J...
A recent news.com story underlined why it’s not nice to have SSSS stamped on your boarding pass in the USA. It means you’ve been lined up for Secondary Security Screening Selection and getting shuffled into ‘Secondary’ in the US is often not a pleasant procedure. At t...
Donald Trump’s announcement that he would like to decertify the Iran nuclear deal – if it really happens and that is far from certain – could reimpose sanctions on Iran. Which conceivably could stall Iran Air’s aircraft orders. When the sanctions were shelved Iran Air...
There’s absolutely no shortage of books about North Korea, I’ve even tackled the subject myself in my book Bad Lands. Donald Trump’s recent forays into the topic, with his less than successful verbal assault on the country’s ‘Rocket Man,’ only focused even more attent...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013