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.
In February I travelled up through the Solomon Islands and into Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. I’ve posted on my back door route to Bougainville, taking a local boat across from Shortland Island, the northernmost island in the Solomons. I’ve also posted on the sad ...
On my way north through the Solomon Islands and on to Bougainville in Papua New Guinea I flew in to Balalae or Ballalae Island. I spent a couple of nights at nearby Shortland Island before thumbing a boat ride to Bougainville with islanders heading to Buin for the Sat...
The Japanese advance across the Pacific had been turned round at Guadalcanal in the Solomons and the Americans were now advancing north. On 13 April 1943 from his base at Rabaul on the Papua New Guinea island of New Britain, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto set out on a moral...
I’ve just travelled up through the Solomon Islands and across to the troubled Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville. You can find various discussions on travelling this route in Thorn Tree. ◄ I started by flying from Brisbane in Australia to Honiara in the Solomo...
The Yarra River is so tranquil as it flows past my place, close to the centre of Melbourne, Australia’s second biggest city, that it’s hard to believe there are rapids further upstream. I’ve been out on the Yarra – the ‘muddy Yarra’ as it’s usually described – wi...
▲ Lonely Planet guidebooks have been available in Chinese for nearly 6 years now, Maureen and I went to China to help launch them in 2006, you can even read the Lonely Planet Story in Chinese. ▲ The most exciting development, however, was when with our Chinese ...
‘Why do the French make such horrible coffee?’ I used to think when I lived in Paris in 1996. If I’d bothered researching the question I’d quickly have found the answer – bad coffee was French government policy. The French government pushed the cheaper, lower quality ...
▲ Wolfe Creek Crater, Western Australia Every now and then I pick up a ‘got to go there’ book, you read it or look at the pictures and that’s what you immediately think. Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands was a fine example, she claimed she hadn’t been t...
▲ Afghan kite, Australian gum tree Australia Day on 26 January is Australia’s equivalent of the USA's 4th of July or France’s Bastille Day (there isn’t a UK equivalent). I go some- where in the state of Victoria every year as part of the ‘Australia Day Ambassador...
My January spell at Apollo Bay in Victoria, Australia included a couple of days walking along the Great Ocean Walk and some interesting encounters with Aussie critters. Not this one, this rather fine looking pterodactyl model featured in a dinosaur walk at the Otway F...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013