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.
Travelling the Trans-Mongolian train from Beijing to Moscow last month put the final tick on a bucket list I drew up in 1992. I don’t think the expression ‘bucket list’ had been created back then, but the list I drew up had 15 ‘must do’s’ on it and 13 of them I enjoye...
A month ago I posted a review of Mark Binelli’s page-turning history of Detroit and some thoughts on my own connections with the city. It’s been an interesting month, to say the least, for Detroit, now the USA’s biggest city bankruptcy case. At the same time there hav...
I’ve still not flown on a Boeing 787 Deamliner – but then A380s had been in service for nearly two years before I made my first flight on the double decker Airbus. I’ve flown them on a number of occasions since, but my first flight wasn’t too successful. Due to a tech...
In Yekateringburg, part way across Russia on our Trans-Mongolian trip, our guide claimed her town’s big Lenin statue was one of only eight big ones left in Russia. We didn’t get to look at it, time was pressing and it was further down the main drag, but it sounded lik...
Theatrically and operatically it’s been a travelling five days in (and out) of London. I’ve already reported on going to the Congo when Maureen and I saw A Season in the Congo on Saturday (Young Vic Theatre). I’ll be talking about the Congo in its latest incarnation a...
My new book Dark Lands is coming out next week and my travels for the Democratic Republic of the Congo chapter took me to Kinshasa, Kisangani and Lubumbashi, all of which feature in A Season in the Congo, currently running at the Old Vic theatre in London. Of course a...
The three letter codes which identifies where your bag should go to are often amusing – LAX for Los Angeles or SIN for that most sin-free nanny state Singapore. I’m heading off to San Francisco soon, SFO which in England means Serious Fraud Office. Plus there are the ...
We’re well into European Russia at Kazan, we’ve travelled around 7000km from Beijing and have just 820km to go. Kazan is our last long stop before Moscow and it’s a very long one, morning arrival, evening departure and the next day we rolled into Moscow before 12 no...
I won’t try to improve on their publisher’s (Allen & Unwin’s) blurb: Uncrossable rivers! Hospitable nomads! Rabid dogs! Marijuana fields! Hailstone flashfloods! Maidens on horseback! Underpants wrestling! Toxic mountain-top lakes! Stupid westerners! And the mounta...
After another long day’s train travel we’re now over 6000km from Beijing and this is our last day in Asia. As we depart Yekaterinburg we’re crossing the Urals and pass a lake and then a tunnel which officially marks the transition from Asian Russia into European Rus...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013