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.
▲ Take the nose and tail of three private jets past their use-by date, join them together with long twisting tubes and turn them into three snakes writhing across the gallery floor. It’s Telle mère tel fils by Adel Abdessemed. Art galleries are all the go in China ...
True or False? • The house of the Prophet Mohammed’s first wife Khadijah in Mecca has been demolished and replaced by a block of toilets • The Victoria’s Secret lingerie shop in Riyadh was burnt to the ground by angry matawwa, the Saudi Arabian religious police •...
▲ The view of earth from 400 km above in the International Space Station Back in 2008, courtesy of Space Adventures. I made a little trip to Moscow to visit the Cosmonaut Training Centre and then fly down to Baikonur in Kazakhstan to see a Soyuz space launch. I was...
Back in 1972 Maureen – at the tail end of the Asia trip which led to the very first Lonely Planet guidebook – Maureen and drove from Perth to Sydney. We shared the petrol costs to cross the continent in an EH Holden. Recently we’ve got back in touch – 40 years later –...
In between philosophising about everything from work, religion, sex and art to philosophy Alain de Botton also hung out at British Airway’s Terminal 5 for a week to watch what goes on. He was accompanied by photographer Richard Baker. It’s subtitled A Heathrow Diary. ...
Fortunately the air travel story in recent weeks has shifted from the tragic (crashed 777s) to the ridiculous (arguments over reclining seats). And for my money the villain of the piece is James Beach, the jerk who used the offending ‘knee defender’, he’s just one ste...
Remember postcards? A rectangle of cardboard with a picture. We used to send them to people, way back before emails and text messages and Facebook and Instagram. Well I still do regularly send postcards – to my mother (pushing 90) and to Maureen’s aunt (sailed past 90...
So most airlines can’t fly over Iraq and as a result airlines heading north or south from or to the Gulf cities (Dubai etc) are flying a little bit to the east over Iran. Including Delta and United? The US has no diplomatic relations with Iran, US companies are not...
Lido di Ostia is the beach resort for Rome, it’s nothing special but convenient if you’re flying out of Rome Fiumicino, the main Rome airport. I had an early morning flight so I decided to stay there and have a look at Ostia Antica, it was the port for ancient Rome, b...
I commented about flying over war zones in my blog on 9 July, a week before MH 17 was brought down. And followed that up with more thoughts on where airlines fly on 29 July.Yesterday I flew from Singapore to London on Singapore Airlines SQ 308. Singapore Airlines had ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013