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.
▲ 1972 – our Mini in Eastern Turkey with Mt Ararat in the background, that’s where Noah landed the Ark Back in 1972 Maureen and I drove a Mini we’d bought in London for £65 to Kabul in Afghanistan, sold it for a small profit and carried on all the way to Sydney...
So is it the world’s worst hotel or the world’s most eco-friendly budget hotel? Watch their You Tube clip and decide – useful advice that if you leave your towels on the towel rail they won’t wash them. And if you leave them on the floor they still won’t wash them. An...
The other night I had a look around the unusual Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Sir John (1753-1837) was a pioneering architect in his era who was responsible for the Bank of England building, although it’s subsequently been chopped around so much that little of h...
When you’ve been nearly everywhere which countries are likely to be left? Of course first you have to decide how many countries there are. Some of us count rather more than the 193 the UN can muster. It’s a topic I mused about last year in How Many Countries. There...
In New York recently I was musing how nobody seemed to walk on escalators and whether it was a cultural thing if you stand or walk? I’m an impatient person and also I reckon I could always do with some more exercise, so I will almost always walk. If there’s the option...
▲ The crowded streets of Thamel in Kathmandu Most visitors to Kathmandu, particularly if they’re staying in popular Thamel spots like the Kathmandu Guest House, will have dropped into Pilgrims Bookshop. It was probably the best bookshop in the Himalaya and cert...
I’ve flown into Copenhagen, Denmark a few times over the years and one thing I always like is the lineup of wind turbines paralleling the coast between the airport and the city. If you come in from the Sweden side, you usually do, there they are, off to your right...
The trouble – well one of the many troubles – with airport security is it’s inconsistent. What they want done in one place they don’t in another. So it’s shoes on or off, belts on or off and sometimes the scanning sensitivity set so high that a credit card sets it off...
Geography can present publishers with lots of problems. I’ve written in the Lonely Planet Story how it regularly tripped us up. That big inlet in the Middle East? It’s the Arabian Gulf according to the Arab countries on its western side. The Persian Gulf to anybody fr...
No visit to New York is complete without a few galleries and museums, so we started our stay with a stroll through Central Park to the Guggenheim. You can check out the Guati Movement, a Japanese art movement following WW II through the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although my favo...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013