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.
India has many railways, but this photographic study follows the picturesque routes of 10 of the narrow gauge lines. Sadly the photographer and author Angus McDonald died before his book was published. In 2013 I was going to be on a panel with him at a travel writing ...
◄ Some of 2015’s best aerial views were from a Beechcraft Super King Air which a bunch of us chartered and flew across Northern Australia. We started at dawn from Melbourne’s Moorabbin Airport, as a group of hot air balloons drifted in from their morning flight over t...
Back in my Lonely Planet days I always found it exciting when one of the company’s foreign language partners produced a Lonely Planet book which had never been published in English. Even though they looked recognisably LP. The 50 Best Towns in China is definitely in t...
◄ Carrying a phone you’re always taking photos you wouldn’t normally grab, if you’re not in the habit of carrying a camera constantly. Like this baby shoe I spotted on my morning riverside jog in Melbourne. Clearly some sweet little brat had taken the shoe off and hur...
Numerous things I’ve run into through the year: ◄ At the beginning of the year, the Melbourne Arts Centre’s ‘Homes’ project. They turned out thousands of little wooden ‘homes’ and people (lots of school kids) decorated them and distributed them all over. I rather l...
◄ An early morning Ryanair 737 flight from London to Turin and as usual the Alps look terrific. Remember the Winter Olympics were held in Turin in 2006, it’s not far from the Fiat motor city to the white stuff. Absolutely the best out-the-window glimpse o...
What is it about hairdressers and punning names? I came across this classic – Barber Streisand – in London’s Exmouth Market recently. Although next door Bagman & Robin seems to be following the punning lead. And last night it was Ms Streisand again, this time i...
What is it about street furniture, signs in particular, that seems to almost magnetically attract vehicles off the road and into disastrous collisions? Well disastrous for the signposts at least. These ‘accidents’ seem to build up to a crescendo just before Christmas,...
Lots of it as usual including, for Maureen, a spell as the chair of the jury for an international chamber music competition in Melbourne. Perhaps fortunately I was overseas at the time …. ▲Catching Van Morrisson on his 70th birthday performing Astral Weeks – includ...
◄ Jason deCaires Taylor, is noted for his submerged sculptures, in particular at Cancun in Mexico where he has a group of figures for scuba divers to admire. A London short term art pop up featured four horses with oil well ‘horse heads’ for heads. They stood, with th...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013