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.
4672km from Beijing ▲ On the long stretch (1842km) from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk there was plenty of time to gaze out the window and watch Siberian forest pass by. For much of that distance across Siberia there’s appear to be nothing to the north of the railway lin...
2830km from Beijing We departed our Lake Baikal barbecue late in the evening and foolishly joined some other party goers for a last drink in one of the restaurant cars. The night went on rather too long before Maureen and I lurched back to our compartment. Since ...
In between Ulan Ude, our first stop in Russia, and Irkutsk, where we would abandon the train for a night, we made a sidetrip on the Circum-Baikal line. It feels like a misnomer, the 160km diversion, turning off the main Trans-Siberian line at Slyudyanka, doesn’t go ‘a...
654km from Ulaanbaatar to Ulan Ude, 2215km from Beijing We departed Ulaanbaatar at night and around dawn we rolled up at Suchbataar on the Mongolian side of the border. We’d been told how to handle things here, leave your passport and arrival forms on the table i...
1561 km from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar We’ve just finished the Trans-Mongolia train trip from Beijing to Moscow. We didn’t take the regular straight through train trip nor did we get off and on at various places along the way. We did it easy on the chartered Zar...
It’s been on my wish list for too many years, but I’ve finally done the big Russian train trip. In fact there are three big Russian train trips, all of them ending in Moscow. We took the Trans-Mongolian which kicks off in Beijing, heads north through Mongolia and meet...
I’ve just read Mark Binelli’s superb book about the decline and fall – and perhaps rebirth – of Detroit. Mark has written for Rolling Stone and indeed this reads like a Rolling Stone page turner, a tale of alternate shock and awe. There’s a great line about using Detr...
It’s the time of year when fires – natural or deliberately lit – break out all over Sumatra in Indonesia and the smoke drifts across Malaysia and Singapore causing local outrage and international disputes. It seems like every year is worse than the year before. ...
Until Thursday I’d never been to Margate, but I’ve had a soft spot for the very English beach resort ever since the first edition of the Lonely Planet Britain guide, back in 1995. We hadn’t been very kind to Margate and our researcher Richard Everist wrote that: ‘L...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013
