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.
Usually around this time of year a bird nests in my house’s courtyard, it’s been blackbirds (which are not a native Australian bird) these past couple of years. They’re often nesting in October and sometimes raise more than one brood. One year I noted the chicks’ depa...
I was one of the judges of the 2015 Warwick Prize for Writing from Warwick University in England. The books had to feature a one word theme: instinct. We ended up with a shortlist of six titles – one of which I could not stand, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Man in Love. Two...
▲ I spent five days aboard an Indonesian phinisi sailing around the Komodo Islands. The Katharina is a newly built (1998), all wooden Bugis-style schooner, operated by Bali-based SeaTrek. I was the guest lecturer on this pre-Ubud Writers Festival voyage. ◄ In the K...
I posted on the new Singapore yesterday, my stays included a spell in the new mega-hotel Marina Bay Sands. I also check out two hotels in Chinatown (New Majestic and Naumi Iliora) and one in Little India (Wanderlust). Two of them featured a development I saw in Hong K...
I’ve been to Singapore twice this year and explored a variety of old and new sites. ◄ I was not knocked out by the Gardens on the Bay – extending from across the freeway from the Marina Bay Sands ‘Integrated Resort’ down to the new waterfront. The big attractions a...
The Nikola Tesla Museum was a highpoint of my recent visit to Serbia, but as I left I visited another superb museum. Out at Belgrade Airport, only a five minute stroll from the Nikolai Tesla Airport Terminal is a very interesting aviation museum. Housed in a flying-sa...
◄ No question, the highlight of my 2015 visit to Serbia was the whacky Nikola Tesla Museum and I discovered another rather wonderful museum while I was there – more on that one tomorrow. During my visit Central Belgrade featured an assortment of huge statues construct...
Tesla – it's that well known Californian electric car – I’ve driven the original two seat roadster, including over the mountain passes in Switzerland, and the current Tesla Model S in both England and Australia. Tesla of course, is named after the scientist-engineer-i...
It looks like I’ve abandoned this blog, it’s been three months since I’ve put anything up. OK, I’m going to fix that, December 2015 I’ll put up something every day. It isn’t like I haven’t been travelling this year – or doing things – or reading books. And we’ll start...
I took a ‘Communism Tour’ in Sofia, Bulgaria – meet outside the Palace of Justice at 4pm on Sunday. Twenty Five years after the fall of Communism it’s pretty clear they’re still trying to come to terms with what it was all about. ▲ The sign and logo for this old Co...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013