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.
The Melbourne Arts Centre is just across the Yarra River from the centre of the city of Melbourne. It features a number of theatre and concert spaces, most of it subterranean. It’s a popular joke that Australia has the world’s best opera house – the outside in Sydney,...
I did a flight over Byron Bay a couple of weeks ago in a 1940s de Havilland Tiger Moth biplane, my daughter Tashi bought me the flight as a Christmas present (thank you Tashi!). ▲ You can see the Byron Bay lighthouse, marking the most easterly point in Australia, a...
◄ The Byron Bay lighthouse marks the most easterly point of Australia. With a group of friends I head off somewhere in Australia for a week in January or February each year. This year Byron Bay was the destination, the LP Australia guide suggests it’s the place where ...
Well perhaps you shouldn’t climb it, some people say the local Aboriginal Bundjalung are unhappy about ascents of Wollumbin, rather like Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Central Australia. On the other hand when you get to Wollumbin National Park, starting point for the Mt Warni...
▲ I was in Sydney for New Year’s Eve, here are the midnight fireworks on the Harbour Bridge. ◄ The next day with a bunch of friends I took the ferry from Circular Quay across to McMahon’s Point and we walk back alongside Lavender Bay to Wendy Whiteley’s Secret Gard...
◄ Last year ended with The Address Hotel in Dubai if not exactly going up in flames certainly having a rather interesting fire. On my last visit to Dubai I nearly stayed in The Address, but instead ended up in the Dubai Creek Hilton. The interesting thing about thi...
In yesterday’s blog I raised the ‘what does it take to say you’ve visited a country’ question. And like Ask the Pilot Patrick Smith I agree that you can’t say you’ve been there if you’ve only been to the airport. But could you ‘visit a country’ between flights? I r...
I’ve bumped into assorted people who have made ‘I’ve been everywhere’ into a major challenge. Well I haven’t been everywhere and I’m not working on it. On the other hand I’d be disappointed if I didn’t get to at least one or two ‘new’ (for me) countries every year. In...
The name may have changed , but otherwise India’s southern centre, the capital of Tamil Nadu, seemed scarcely changed even though I haven’t been there for a long spell. ◄ Top of my plans for my return visit was to check out Anstruther’s Cage at Fort St George. In 1...
In a country where central planning tried to run everything and Socialist Realism aimed for the grand, the majestic, the over-decorated, somehow bus stops escaped the net. Christopher Herwig spent more than a decade and travelled over 30,000 km around the countries of...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013