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.
The Arcelor Mittal Orbit is the weirdly twisting tower constructed for the 2012 Olympics in London. The whole Olympic Park is in the process of being redeveloped so hardly any of it is currently open to the public. You can visit the tower and zip up to the 80 metr...
◄ Every place we stopped on the walk to Ciudad Perdida seemed to have a resident cat, whether it was at an overnight refuge or a trailside refreshment stop. All of them small, sleek and content – ie not a scrawny scrounger. This one is Pilar, at the archaeological gue...
Always something new at Singapore’s Changi Airport? In fact the Butterfly Garden has been there since 2008, I just hadn’t been in the right terminal (or perhaps the right place in the right terminal?) before. It’s in the transit mall of Terminal 3 (the Singapore Air...
It’s not a walking guide, but if you want to have some of the complete confusion of Colombian events laid out then Tom Feiling's Short Walks from Bogotá is a great introduction. Of course you’re going to come away with the realisation that it’s whole lot more complica...
My final Colombia excursion was out to the Guajira Peninsula, the finger of land curving over the eastern corner of Venezuela and pointing towards the Dutch ‘ABC Islands,’ Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. I travelled to this remote corner of Colombia with Germán Escobar (C...
I’ve just finished a trip to South America – postings soon on walking up to Ciudad Perdida, Colombia’s fabulous jungle-shrouded ‘Lost City.’ And on a trip out to the remote Macuira National Park, way out towards the end of the desert Guajira Peninsula. Out there you f...
A return trip to Colombia was the final journey for my forthcoming book Dark Lands and while I was in the country I made the trek up to Ciudad Perdida, the ‘Lost City.’ The ancient Tayrona capital was principally built between the 11th and 14th centuries and then, its...
Forget the movie, I want the moving map up in front of me when I’m flying places. Often it alerts me to look out the window at whatever is passing by underneath. And even if there’s nothing to see I still want to know where we’ve got to, how much further we have to go...
Since I’m finishing writing a book to be titled Dark Lands – Colombia is the last chapter and my Colombia travels concluded last week – I thought I’d better read Dom Joly’s The Dark Tourist. Mr Joly is a British comedian and he’s very popular with the British, or ...
Joseph Conrad – author of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness (the literary inspiration for Apocalypse Now) only had one ship command during his nautical career. In 1899 the sailing ship Otago put in to Bangkok when its captain died. Conrad assumed the command and sailed t...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013