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.
It’s the word in the Australia national anthem – Advance Australia Fair – which causes all the head scratching and sour expressions. Verse 1, Line 4: Our home is girt by sea Archaic word meaning surrounded by or washed by, ie Australia is an island. Oh really? ...
▲ Last night Edward Snowden talked to a large audience at the Melbourne Convention Centre via video link from Moscow. He was interviewed by Julian Morrow from the satirical team The Chaser. We got to pose questions to Mr Snowden and the one top on my list was wheth...
A couple of years ago I blogged about the disappearance of postcards in our Instagram and email age. Well two years later I’m still regularly sending postcards to my last two card recipients: my 91 year old mother and Maureen’s 94 year old Aunt Kate. In that last blog...
I’m a sucker for FlightRadar24, that app that lets you track aircraft all over the world or identify whatever might be flying above you right now. Well not quite all over the world, I’ve noted before that flights between the Middle East and Australia tend to disapp...
A former Lonely Planet author Leif Pettersen worked on the Lonely Planet Romania guidebook and it’s pretty clear Count Dracula got his fangs in to Leif at some point. Backpacking with Dracula, available on Amazon as an ebook, supplies way more information on Transylva...
Melaleuca is the starting or finishing point for the South Coast Track, the access point (if you don’t come by boat) to Bathurst Harbour and it was also the arrival and departure point for my recent visit to the Southwest. It’s also ground zero for the Deny King st...
The ‘getting there is half the fun’ line certainly applied to my recent trip to Southwest Tasmania. In both direction. We flew down from Hobart – departing from the smaller Cambridge Airport, just a km or so away from Hobart’s main airport – on a Par Avion Britten Nor...
The Tasmanian Southwest Park is about as remote as you can get in Tasmania. The 84km South Coast Track runs from Cockle Creek, accessible by road at the eastern end of the park, to the airstrip at Melaleuca on an inlet from Bathurst Harbour in the west. Most walkers w...
In 1975, as the military dictatorship in Portugal crumbled and their colonies in Africa (Angola and Mozambique) and Southeast Asia (Portuguese Timor) were cut loose the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński turned up in Luanda and spent the next three months watching ...
Although my recent visit to Guatemala – wearing my Global Heritage Fund archaeology hat – was principally to see the remote jungle site of El Mirador I also went back to Tikal, which I last visited way back in 1998. It’s a big contrast to El Mirador – no helicopter or...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013