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.
Back in 2006 I wrote a brief review of Mo Tejani’s A Chameleon’s Tale. I commented that Mo’s life was typical of today’s global nomads, living here, connected to there, nationality somewhere else. Although Mo lived in Thailand he started out in Uganda, until his famil...
▲ Cruising the Karakoram Highway When Maureen and I travelled up the Karakoram Highway through northern Pakistan into China in September we had periodic delays and stoppages. A couple of landslides blocked the road, there were political protests because of that ‘...
I’m old enough to still like having a watch on my wrist, although I do look at my phone when I want to know what time it is somewhere else. Is the UK 9 hours behind or 11? Earlier this year I dropped in to the watch museum at Glasshütte in the once-upon-a-time East...
Last week I had dinner at Melbourne University with assorted people involved in the media, journalism and publishing in Australia and the guest of honour Lord Justice Leveson. Sir Brian Leveon was in Australia to deliver lectures on his recently completed report into ...
My recent visit to Belgium was in pursuit of King Leopold II’s Belgian Congo connections in Brussels and Ostend. I was only a few steps out of the Ostend train station when I came upon the Amandine, the last Ostend fishing trawler to operate in Icelandic waters. L...
A weird relationship isn’t it? Underlined yet again by the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut. The USA gun illustration is on the wall at the front of the ex-US Embassy in Tehran, Iran. I live part of the year in Australia (annual deaths by guns...
▲ Paykans and the Ayatollah in Isfahan OK it’s a movie, not a book or an article – I went to see Argo the Ben Affleck film about getting six American diplomats out of Tehran during the 1980 Iran ‘hostage crisis’. Great movie although it’s been criticised for glor...
Last year I blogged about visiting the National Library in Canberra, Australia and finding out about enclaves and exclaves along the borders between India and Bangladesh and between Belgium and the Netherlands. While I was in Belgium continuing my pursuit of King Le...
Last year I blogged about my travels around the Congo (the big, bad Congo DRC although I also hopped across the border – the Congo River – to Congo Brazzaville). Plus I read the best book to read about the Belgian colonial horror story – King Leopold’s Ghost. On my...
Earlier this year I travelled up through the north Solomon Islands and joined a village boat across from Shortland Island to Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. I wrote it up as taking the Back Door to Bougainville, since it’s not an official entry point into the countr...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013