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.
My circuit of Turkish archaeological sites continued to Sagalassos, about 120km inland from the resort city of Antalya. It’s a remarkable site because extensive work on the site only commenced in the mid-1980s, led by a team from Belgium under Marc Waelkens. So its de...
'It is not down on any map; true places never are.’ It’s one of Herman Melville’s most famous quotes, from Moby Dick, and Alastair Bonnett’s book certainly pursues that idea. Many of his ‘Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities and Forgotten Islands’ never appear on maps or fad...
We continued our Turkey trip from Göreme to Koya with a couple of interesting stops en route.▲ As we approached the town of Aksaray the snow-capped volcanic peak of Mt Hasan, Hasan Dağı in Turkish, was clearly visible off to the south. ▲ We paused at the massive Su...
The next stop on our Turkey circuit was Göreme, Maureen and I were there way back in 1972 and we’ve never been back. ▲ Göreme is the principal village in the fairytale district of Cappadocia, noted for its lunar landscape of ‘fairy chimneys.’ Over the centuries the...
▲ The Citadel A city of more than a million population, Gaziantep has a hulking citadel in the centre of town, a busy bazaar, the best pistachio baklava in Turkey and the stunning new Gaziantep Zeugma Mosaic Museum. The mosaics are mainly from the Roman city of Bel...
My second stop in a GHF tour of Turkish archaeological sites was at mysterious Nemrut Dagi. Note that there are two mountains name Nemrut Dağı in Turkey, this is the one further to the west. The long and winding road to the mountain top, followed by a winding climb fr...
I’m on the board of GHF – Global Heritage Fund – and I’ve been travelling around Turkey looking at their current Turkish site (Göbekli Tepe), a previous site (Çatalhöyük) and assorted other sites that GHF are interested in, might be interested in or were simply worth ...
The Saxon villages of Transylvania are a GHF project, they’re attempting to preserve villages which have suffered depopulation and neglect since the fall of Communism in 1989. ▲ These beautiful little villages preserve not just medieval architecture, but a medieval...
I’ve never been to Romania before (it was on my list) so the Global Heritage Fund project project in Transylvania, which I wrote about exactly a year ago, was a good reason to plan a visit. But first I stopped in Bucharest for a couple of days. Poor Romania has had...
It’s Il giro d’Italia in 80 librerie – the Tour of Italy to 80 bookshops – with a subtitle ‘not to mention schools and libraries.’ The idea is on weekends over the next couple of months a relay of Italian publishers and authors will cycle from the north of Italy right...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013