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.
On my recent visit to Moscow to help with the launch of the first Lonely Planet guidebooks in Russian I was intrigued by the interest in a Russian language version of Lonely Planet’s Russia guide. I’ve always said that our first Russia guidebook was the most difficult...
Maureen and I spent last week in Russia – first in St Petersburg (I’d never been there) and then in Moscow (Maureen hadn’t been there since back in the 1970s, in the Soviet era. My time in Moscow was spent with Lonely Planet’s Russian publishing partners Eksmo who are...
Like many people in London I devoted some of yesterday to getting rather wet as a thousand odd boats rowed, paddled and powered their way down the Thames as part of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant – that’s 60 years since she took up her role as Queen of England. ...
Maureen and I made a backstage tour of Kew Gardens in London. I’ve been to the gardens a few times over the years and made too many close visits on final approaches into London’s Heathrow Airport. There’s a great deal of discussion about London airports at the moment ...
▲ The Gladiator of Guitar We caught Elvis Costello performing at the Albert Hall on Wednesday night and in the penultimate encore who should stride on stage to join him but – as Costello put it – the gladiator of guitar, Russell Crowe. OK it’s hard to tell from th...
I’m chairing the panel of judges for the 2012 Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award, the annual award for the best British travel book. Currently I’m working through the entries with my fellow judges Sarah Spankie of Conde Nast Traveller magazine, Susie Dowdall the Boo...
Every now and then I bump into somebody who’s busy trekking around the world putting a ‘been there’ tick beside a list of every country in the world. You can have arcane arguments about what ‘been there’ means – is the airport transit lounge good enough? But the start...
▲ On 5 March in Melbourne, Australia I got up at dawn and drove over to Port Melbourne to see the Queen Mary 2 arrive in dock. A couple of weeks earlier I’d stopped in at Rabaul on my way through Papua New Guinea, having arrived in the country by a very much smalle...
▲ RAM cuts loose at the Oloffson Hotel Haiti may have been knocked flat by the earthquake, but the music and art is as vibrant as ever. On my previous, pre-earthquake, visit to Port-au-Prince I stayed at the Oloffson Hotel and caught RAM on their regular Thursday...
I was in Haiti before the earthquake, so my April trip, kicking off from the Dominican Republic, was a return visit. Things are still a long way from back to normal. The tent camps are still everywhere although one right in the centre of the capital, Port au Prince, ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013