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.
▲ The Wall at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and East Jerusalem ◄ Travelling around Palestine you certainly don’t get away from the Israeli settlements or The Wall – aka the Security Wall, the Separation Wall, the Segregation Wall or the Apartheid Wall...
▲ Sunset camels in the Jerusalem Wilderness above the Dead Sea I’ve been travelling around Palestine and then on to Israel. First lesson, there’s nothing dangerous about Palestine. Terrorist talk has comprehensively scared tourists away and the Israelis don’t mak...
◄ The other night I went to an opera first night in Melbourne with Maureen, I wore a dinner jacket and my Kaiser Bill cufflinks. There’s a story behind those cufflinks with the German Imperial Eagle and a ruby in the centre and how I came to own them. My great gran...
I don’t just read travel books – although three recent novels also travelled through their pages. I really liked Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011. Following the inter-connected lives of rock mogul Bennie Sala...
▲ Our Korea guidebook has a section on Architecture as Art in the Seoul chapter. Featuring the Kring Gumho Culture Complex ‘looking like a giant music speaker crossed with a slab of Swiss cheese.' (Unsangdong Architects) ▲ Just down the road is the I’Park Tower...
Speculating on what’s happening north of the border is a favourite South Korean occupation and the best story from my recent visit was that Gaddafi still lives. At least in North Korea. Earlier this year Air Koryo, the North Korean flag carrier, started a weekly Py...
Maureen and I went to Jeju, the holiday island dangling off the southern end of the Korean Peninsula, for the World Trail Conference, a get together for walking trail organisers and administrators from around the world. ◄ with Suh Myung-sook While we were in Jej...
▲ Maureen and I spent two days with a Monash University archaeology group visiting recently discovered Aboriginal rock art sites in Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. Like this superb kangaroo. ▲ Getting to these remote sites – a couple of hundred ...
I’ll have a travel blog on a visit to Arnhem Land Aboriginal art sites up in the next few days. I spent a day in Darwin after my Arnhem Land explorations and made a return trip to Darwin’s wonderful Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory ▲ The bright...
. ▲ Before and after my recent Mustang trek I paused in Kathmandu arriving and departing. It was my first visit in 8 years and it was a pleasure to find so many things completely unchanged, like the chaos of travel business signs in Thamel, the backpacker centre...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013