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.
▲ Last week I was in Banteay Chhmar , an Angkorian ruins site in the far north-east of Cambodia. I was there with John Sanday, the British archaeologist who has been working on this site for three years now. John was also responsible for a great deal of the preserv...
My recent southern England museum tour included one more interesting place, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum. Merton Russell-Cotes was a tourism pioneer in Bournemouth, one of the towns which pioneered ‘going to the seaside’ tourism in England. He bought...
▲ Flying out of London to Morocco a few weeks ago we passed just north of the Isle of Wight, with the whole island framed in my window. Earlier this year we sailed around the southern coast of the island and then up the Solent into Southampton on board the Queen Ma...
I managed to depart Boston just before Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of the USA. I was in Boston for the opening of the big new Hostelling International Boston Hostel and most of my brief stay in the city was tied up with that. . I did get to walk around th...
Last month Maureen and I had a short stay at a friend’s house in Marrakesh in Morocco. Our previous two visits to Marrakesh were in 2007 when we drove through on our way to Banjul in Gambia on the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge – nurse an old car down to West Africa and gi...
A quick trip London-Boston-London to speak at the new state-of-the art Boston Hostelling International place, 480 beds, many of them in private rooms, lots of communal space and facilities and neatly squeezed between Chinatown and the Theater District and a stone’s th...
Three years ago, on a visit to Galway in Ireland, I drove up the coast to the place where in 1919 pioneer aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown touched down on the first ever trans-Atlantic flight. Soon afterwards I had a look at their ungainly Vickers Vimy biplane in...
Before my recent trip up the Karakoram Highway through northern Pakistan to Kashgar in China I spent a day on a side trip to the Murree hill station and looking around Islamabad. On my last visit to Pakistan in early 2006 I went to the ancient Buddhist site at Taxila,...
Daniel Smith adds to the list of travel list books – Lonely Planet has certainly done a few of them – with 100 Places You Will Never Visit. In fact some of them you probably won’t want to visit – terrorist would prefer to avoid Guantánamo Bay, ditto for drug smugglers...
◄ Yes, it’s a Murree Beer, the national beer of Pakistan. In fact the only beer of Pakistan. Officially Pakistanis – good Muslims all (or almost all) – can’t touch alcohol. Which makes being the country’s only brewery a difficult business, you would think. In fact Mu...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013