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.
There’s always lots of bird activity around my place in Australia, this time of year I can watch my courtyard blackbird and my computer screen at the same time. Last year I noted the first blackbird chicks had hatched out and were contemplating departure at the end of...
Between my recent visit to Shanghai and to Guizhou Province in China I stopped in Hong Kong to meet some friends and climb a little mountain. Hong Kong has a surprising amount of countryside and walking trails and lots of peaks you can climb, to peer through the China...
▲ At Hong Kong Airport these warning signs appear on all the escalators. You’ll also hear regular warnings on the MTR – the Hong Kong subway system – to pay attention to the outside world, not to focus all your attention on your phone. These mobile/cell phone warnings...
There’s a new Lonely Planet travel book about to hit the shelves – An Innocent Abroad – and I’m one of the 35 contributing writers. My tale, Cabbage Soup, involves arriving at a campsite on the Yugoslavian Adriatic Coast back in the Tito days and discovering the campe...
My Guizhou travel, with the village of Dali as the main focus, started and finished in the capital city, Guiyang. There are direct flights to and from Hong Kong and there’ll soon be a high speed train service linking Guiyang with Guangzhou. ▲ The Jiaxiu Pavilion in...
Global Heritage Fund are working on the preservation of Dali, a Dong minority village in Guizhou province, but tourism has already arrived at some corners of the region. Notably in Zhaoxing, described in the Lonely Planet China guide as the ‘quintessential Dong villag...
My Guizhou trip was involved with Global Heritage Fund’s work in the region. Guizhou is one of the most ethnically mixed regions of China with minority groups making up more than a third of the total population. The biggest group are Miao people, closely related to th...
It’s always nice to end up somewhere which seems to be off the map and there are certainly plenty of those places in China. Like Feiyunya, about 130 km (in a straight line) north-east of Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province. It doesn’t appear on maps, in our scrip...
I spent a few days looking around Guizhou. It is (or was) the poorest province in China, a place ‘without three li of flat land, three days of fine weather, or three coins to rub together.’ It’s also a place where, clearly, an awful lot of development is happening. ...
My room at the Hotel Icon in Hong Kong a few days ago featured an in-room printer, ideal for when you need to print off boarding passes or other paperwork. And a free minibar, now that’s a nice touch. ◄ And, best of all, a free mobile phone. When you check in you g...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013