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.
Kicked out of the USA? Although probably we never entered? Either way it was a new travel experience and an unexpected one. With four British friends we’d been sailing around the Virgin Islands in a chartered boat, we started in Tortola and after five days in the B...
From British Virgin Islands my little group continued on to the US Virgin Islands (with an unexpected interruption by US immigration which I’ll cover in the next report!). ◄ We started with St John Island, which offers plenty of walking opportunities for energe...
From Mexico (Tulum and other Mayan ruins) and Havana (where old American cars and new Cuban restaurants are both doing fine) the next stop was the British Virgin Islands. A place for doing things rather than merely looking at them, although the sunsets were certainly ...
OK the politics is changing in baby steps since Fidel is still there, even if only in the background. The old American cars seem to be multiplying, I even had this crazy thought that somebody was buying them up in the USA and shipping them to Cuba. But if there was on...
After Mexico I flew on from Cancun to Havana, 13 years since I was there last. Way back then I’d gone thinking ‘better get there before Fidel falls off the perch.’ Well all those years later he’s still there, or at least still there behind the scenes. Brother Raul is ...
▲ Staying on the beach at Tulum on my recent Mexico visit it was inevitable that Mayan ruins would be part of the trip. Starting with the ruins right in Tulum of course, with El Castillo picturesquely balanced on the hilltop above the beach. ◄ We also...
I’ve been staying in the 5000 square km Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve on the Caribbean coast of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Cancun is the big beach resort of Quintana Roo, but the state also features other resorts (Playa del Carmen and lower key Tulum), the isla...
The wonders of flying ‘Great Circle’ routes never cease to amaze me. You fly between Australia and southern Africa (Jo’burg say) or southern South America (Buenos Aires) and a glance at the map and you think it’s straight across the Indian Ocean or the southern South ...
Got a few hours to kill at Heathrow? Well if you’ve arranged it in advance – or you’re an important enough British Airways or One World frequent flyer – you could go have a look at the British Airways Speedbird Centre, a neat little museum tracking the Imperial Airway...
‘Winglets,’ those little flick up bits at the end of an aircraft’s wings, are all the go. They first appeared on an assortment of gliders and privates jets, but as regular passengers we probably first saw them on the Boeing 747-400 from 1985. Forget the buzzwords and ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013