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.
◄ What is it about taxis and movies? Film directors just love to squeeze inside those four wheeled confines. Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth – which visits Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome and Helsinki all in one night is a favourite, but yesterday I saw two taxi...
Mumbai or Bombay it’s always good to revisit the business (and Bollywood) capital of India. A wander around central Mumbai took me past plenty of interesting architecture, like the art-deco Eros Cinema. ► St Thomas Cathedral has an extensive collection of British m...
Fifty of them through the year – well some of them rented houses, a villa in Bali, an old mansion house in Transylvania. Lots of them just for a night, but a number for a week. Plus two boats (Sea Cloud II in the Mediterranean, Katharina around the Komodo Islands). No...
Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a clever project. From the cover it’s yet another self-help manual, although with a racy title. Inside the chapters are arranged just like a self-help book should be, running through from ‘Move to the City,’ via ...
I made a brief visit to Madrid in 2015 to speak at a ‘Future of Travel’ conference put on by The Economist. I’ll remember the visit particularly for how cold and wet it was. The few days I’d had in London before I arrived in Madrid were much more comfortable. I didn’t...
▲ My 2015 travels also took me back to Yogyakarta, Indonesia’s ‘cultural capital.’ Yogya painter Affandi ‘s home has been turned into a museum and art gallery, his exotically customised Mitsubishi Galant is just as colourful as the paintings. I didn't get outside the ...
This year was Singapore’s 50th birthday and TEDx Singapore featured talks from Singapore's history over that half century: The Undiscovered Country. I spent a few days rediscovering Singapore old and Singapore new and then spoke at the TEDx conference about my nearly ...
◄ My recent Komodo Islands boat trip wasn’t the only travel by sea in 2015, Maureen and I also made an opera cruise on the three-masted barque Sea Cloud II. Here it is under full sail. In fact we didn’t travel very much by windpower, although definitely rather more th...
I had a bunch of books to read for this year’s Warwick Writing Prize – I was one of the judges – and the book I brought in, Skyfaring, got through to the shortlist. The final winner was Redeployment. One of my reading highlights in 2015 was Abigail Ulman’s shor...
Jakarta appeared briefly on my travel itinerary in 2015. It’s a city somewhat lacking in iconic attractions, apart from Monas, the giant column better known as ‘Sukarno’s Last Erection.’ Like Mao – and many Western leaders for that matter – Sukarno was reputed to have...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013