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.
On my 2014 visit to Havana I suggested that Cuba could be the world’s next hot restaurant destination. Two years later there are even more interesting places to dine although I found myself returning to familiar haunts: ▲ La Guarida – the ‘lair’ or ‘hideout’ – wa...
Wearing my Global Heritage Fund archaeology hat I visited a very modern archaeology site in Havana, the National School of Arts in Marianao. Here’s the rather flower power School of Fine Arts at the complex. ▼ Soon after the revolution Fidel and Che were out playing ...
On my last trip to Cuba in 2014 I was delighted to note that the old American cars seemed to be looking better than ever. Many of them resplendent in pastel shades that never featured on the Detroit colour charts back in their era. ▲ Two years later there’s no chan...
When I visited Cuba in 2014 Ernest Hemingway’s hideaway, Finca la Vigia, the Museo Hemingway wasn’t open. Somebody was making a film. ▲ Hemingway’s study It was certainly open this trip and this major Havana attraction was very popular. The house is a delight an...
Internet connections are strange in Cuba, it’s one of the things that is going to change rapidly if Cuba really does open up after Obama’s visit. At the moment you’re not going to find Wi-Fi in your hotel room or in casa particulares – the Cuban B&Bs which are ...
After my 16 March Brunei posting I’ve been travelling a lot – London, Guatemala, Cuba, Panama, New York – and then back to Australia. So a bunch of rather late postings (and in no particular order) over the next week or two. Starting with Cuba, where I turned up soon ...
Maureen and I visited Bandar Seri Begawan – BSB to its friends – back in 1974 when we were working on the very first edition of Lonely Planet’s South-East Asia on a Shoestring. From Singapore we travelled across to North Borneo – the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sa...
Last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl – The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster is exactly what its title indicates, a series of monologues about the Chernobyl meltdown. Human error (a foolish shutdown ...
The Sultan of Brunei, intent on underlining his South-East Asia nation’s Ruritanian image, decided his 2015 gift to the Christmas media silly season would be banning Christmas.Well it’s not Islamic is it? Santa Claus and Christmas trees aren’t exactly religious images...
◄ Cycling trips, walking trips, boat trips, they all seem to fire the travel writing imagination. Sadly the means of travel we probably use more than any other for longer trips – flying – doesn’t seem to do it. Oh yes, there are some great flying books , like Alexande...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013