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.
Nick Lake’s novel jumps back and forth between Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake and Haiti during the slave revolt which led to liberation from France. In ‘Now’ we’re with Shorty, 15 years old and trapped in a hospital room which has collapsed with the ear...
Maureen and I flew in to Santo Domingo from New York, spending a few days in this fine old colonial city before taking a bus to Port au Prince in Haiti. There’s not a lot to see in the DR’s capital, but it’s easy enough to spend a couple of days wandering the Zona Col...
Aircraft Names The Qantas A380 fleet is named after famous Australian aviators. Their first A380 was named after Nancy Bird Walton. That was the aircraft which suffered an engine explosion out of Singapore in 2010 and spent over a year on the ground in Singapore b...
Late last year I travelled around Israel and Palestine, later this year Pakistan is on my wish list. So these two books were interesting primers on those countries. Of course both books proved, yet again, that the more you learn about a subject the less you realise yo...
Observant visitors to Bali soon become familiar with canangsari, the little offerings which are put out every morning for the spirits, good and bad, which pervade everything in Bali. A little woven tray sports a few flower petals, a few grains of rice, perhaps a crack...
I’ve always loved the travel element of William Gibson’s novels, the use of the weirder corners of our world today as models for a just-around-the-corner future. Distrust that Particular Flavor is a collection of Gibson’s non-fiction – essays, reviews, reports, analys...
Everywhere I went in Bali giant ogoh-ogoh figures were under construction. Not only everywhere, but everytime – when I set out from Ubud at midnight to drive to the foot of Mt Agung to climb that iconic volcano ogoh-ogoh constructors were still hard at work. The ...
▲ For our 2004 book Rice Trails – A journey through the ricelands of Asia & Australia –photographer Richard I’Anson and I wanted an iconic photograph of Balinese rice farmers working on their fields with the island’s holy mountain, Gunung Agung, towering over...
Taras Grescoe travels the world looking for banned or disapproved of drinks, foods and substances. So he goes through a meal via aperitif, crackers, cheese, main course, a smoke, digestif, dessert, herbal tea and finally (and very final) a one-time-only nightcap • ...
My Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea trip took me via a back door entry into PNG through the Shortlands Islands. En route I had a look at the tragic history of Balalae Island and then tracked down the wreckage of Admiral Yamamoto’s WW II crash. On Bougainville I ma...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013