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.
So there’s the first thing that’s so surprising about Kansas City. It’s not in Kansas, it’s in Missouri, OK a bit of it sprawls across into Kansas, but most of it is in Missouri. Surprise two is it is so amazingly quiet. OK it’s the day after Thanksgiving, that might ...
In 2022 I made a little USA and Canda Road Trip with British travel journalist Simon Calder. We started in Milwaukee, went north to Green Bay, Wisconsin, spent a night in delightful Eau Claire, cut across to Hibbing, Minnesota and managed to visit Bob Dylan’s childhoo...
The popular holiday port of Málaga (population 600,000) is less than 150km from Gibraltar and 600km down the coast from Valencia (population 840,000), the coastal city which was hit so hard by disastrous killer floods in late October 2024. It was another place I visit...
Arthur Frommer, the pioneering author of Europe on $5 a Day, died at the age of 95 on 18 November 2024. The Guardian wrote that his book’s advice ‘became so standard that it’s hard to remember how radical it seemed in the days before discount flights and backpacks....
◄ Eric Beecher’s The Men Who Killed the News Eric Beecher is the principal owner of Private Media which publishes the daily Australian online newsletter Crikey. In June 2022 Crikey suggested that Murdoch hands weren’t so clean when it came to Trump supporters makin...
No, Mt Kosciuszko at 2228metres is not the highest mountain in Australia – I finally got around to making the stroll to the top of that peak in 2021. If you want to reach the high point on undisputed Australian territory – ie not somewhere in Antarctica – then you sti...
In October I was in India, I started in Delhi where I was surprised to encounter lots of Lamborghinis at Delhi’s rather marvellous Imperial Hotel. Then I continued to Jaipur where I was wheeled around by Women With Wheels, a terrific program to put women behind the wh...
◄ Villefranche, squeezed between Nice and Monaco, could you ask for a more postcard-like French coastal town? Who doesn’t like the south of France, that golden coastline, the Côte d’Azur? I travelled along that coast while I was still at university in the late ‘60s...
It’s a British National Trail, the only one to follow a river and definitely a river worth following. From its source west of Oxford it runs for 184 miles (294km) through the Cotswolds, to Oxford and on past iconic English names like Abingdon, Henley and Windsor and t...
It was appropriate that just before my recent visit to Albania I read Enver Hoxha's Long Shadow, John Watkins’ illuminating look at the country he first visited back in 1987 and then compared it to Albania today. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s despotic dictator, died in 1985,...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013