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.
I rode the Blues Train. It’s a nice combination of train spotting and blues music which operates on summer Friday or Saturday nights along the Bellarine Peninsula outside Melbourne from Queenscliff to Drysdale (all of 16km) and back. Not quite as far as my trip on the...
◄ Port Fairy Lighthouse I spent a week in Port Fairy in January, it’s Australian summer and Port Fairy is a popular escape from Melbourne. It’s 300km (200 miles) west along the coast, just before the border with South Australia and has a long (by Australian standar...
The subtitle of Anne Applebaum’s fascinating, but terribly depressing, tale tells it all. In the period from 1944, the year before the final collapse of Nazi Germany, to 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution, the Soviet Union truly did crush Eastern Europe. Af...
One of those books which I only read because somebody gave it to me – thank you Linda and Lowry – and I loved it! Douglas Cruickshank turns up in a small village in the far west of Uganda to work with coffee growers as a late-in-life Peace Corps volunteer, falls i...
My early January Tongan trip – which ended in the Ha’apai Islands group just before Cyclone Ian arrived – also featured Vava’u, the main island in the Vava’u group. ▲ The picturesque St Joseph’s Cathedral, overlooking Neifau, the island’s main town. Well only t...
Ruth Ozeki’s mysterious novel was a short list contender for the 2013 Booker Prize. The other 2013 contender I’ve read was Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic, which only made the long list. I was particularly interested in that one because of its connections with the first ...
I've posted several reports over the last few days on my recent visit to Tonga, I departed just as Cyclone Ian arrived. ▲ Whale watching is the big Tongan tourist attraction although I turned up in the wrong season, July through September is the prime time for...
William Blacker heads off to Romania soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the violently ignominious end of the Ceaușescus. It’s often speculated that North Korea’s dynastic dictatorship may come to an equally surprising and rapi...
The remote Ha’apai Islands in Tonga were one of Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel top 10 regions for 2014 and they were the last stop on my recent Tongan travels. I flew out of Ha’apai to Tongatapu, the main island, and on to New Zealand on Thursday 9 January, the next d...
I’m still waiting for more comprehensive news on Ha’apai, the last stop on my recent Tonga visit and the island group hardest hit by Cyclone Ian. The cyclone turned up just after we left. ◄ The koki or red shining parrot is supposedly found only on ‘Eua and in ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013