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.
Maureen and I travelled around South-East Asia for most of 1974 researching the very first edition of South-East Asia on a Shoe- string. Much more recently Brian Thacker took the same trip from Timor in the south to Laos in the north using a copy of that first edition...
◄ When I rewrote the intro to Bad Lands for a recent reprint I noted that nothing much had changed, Fidel in Cuba, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, a mess in Iraq, no driving licences for women in Saudi Arabia, the generals in Burma, everywhere you looked it was no change....
▲ Next April is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the Titanic Quarter, a major regeneration of the Belfast docklands where the Titanic was built, will open before that date rolls around. Well ‘it was OK when it left here’ they like to say a...
At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Dave Gorman’s Power Point Presentation looked at how ‘facts’ on the web can propagate. He may have been born a Christian and become an atheist, but when his Wikipedia entry described him as Jewish that ‘fact’ soon spread far and wide. ...
I’ve often said that some of the best travel books are about staying home. Check Lonely Planet’s A House Somewhere for proof of that view. Bill Bryson’s latest book rambles around his old house in the English county of Norfolk. It’s an old church rectory, built in...
It’s festival time in Edinburgh so I took the train up to Scotland and spent a couple of days catching festival events – mainly comedy. There are literally thousands of performances during the festival (it concludes on 29 August). They include plenty of free events,...
We made a trip west from London to Devon and Cornwall, the counties at the extreme south-west corner of England. Cornwall ends at, appropriately, Lands End. Keep heading west and you reach the Americas. Our first stop was Torquay, a popular English seaside resort, pac...
▲ There’s plenty to catch your eye cycling around London. Like many London cyclists a spin round Richmond Park makes a pleasant little training run, for me it’s 10km there, 10km for each lap, 10km back. Richmond Park will feature in the Olympic Cycling Road Race eve...
The River Cam winds its picturesque way through the English university town of Cambridge, its tranquil waters crowded by colliding punters, its riverbanks fringed by willow trees. Behind King’s College – founded by King Henry VI in 1441 – you can find the town’s most ...
Having acquired two Brazzaville Beach stamps in my passport – one when I took the boat from Kinshasa to Kisangani, so I entered Congo Republic at Brazzaville Beach, the second when I left Congo Republic at the same point – it was obviously time I read William Boyd’s n...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013