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.
A classic Provençal fishing port, a little east of Marseille, from my Tarn River canoeing trip I travelled south to Montpellier, then east past Marseille and the Parc national des Calanques to Cassis. The series of spectaular gorges known as calanques slash the coastl...
A bit north of Montpellier and Avignon, a bit south of Clermont-Ferrand and Lyon, the gorges of the Tarn River are in a wonderful region of the south of France and let’s be honest, they are truly spectacular. I was number eight in a group of eight canoeists to spend t...
◄ Atlas & Zanzibar Bookshop – Come to Gent and speak for the Atlas & Zanzibar Bookshop Frank van Os suggested. Quite why Gent would have the best travel bookshop in Belgium I have no idea, but it looked like an interesting town so I didn’t need much persuadi...
My three recent European blogs – Turin in Italy, Lugano in Switzerland, Paris in … now which country is that again? – were the final stepping stones on a 45 day trip from Melbourne in Australia to London in … now which country is that again? Once I’d finally arrived i...
So how do I get back to London after my USI (Università della Svizzera italiana) course at Lugano in Switzerland? Train to Milan and out to Malpensa Airport, fly to London is the quickest route. Instead I take the train to Zurich and then the high speed TGV Lyria in 4...
▲ I Love Lugano On the waterfront at Lugano, the lakeside city in the heart of the Italian region of Switzerland. Supposedly 63% speak German, 23% French and 8% Italian which does not add up to 100%. I spent a week in May teaching a tourism course with the USI (Uni...
◄ Salone Internazionale del Libro – Turin Book Festival Alice through the looking glass – attraverso lo specchio in Italian – was the theme of the event and I was there with EDT – Edizioni di Torino – the publishers of Italian language editions of Lonely Planet. On...
I arrived in the East Bay – disembarking the Coast Starlight from Seattle in Emeryville and taking the bus across to San Francisco – as another step on my Melbourne to London trek. Maureen and I lived in the East Bay (in Berkeley, ‘the only city in America with its ow...
▲Amtrak Coast Starlight to Los Angeles I’m travelling from Melbourne to London the long way and that includes the daily Amtrak train from Seattle to Oakland down the US West Coast. It continues on to Los Angeles, but my 800mile journey takes 23 hours 30 minutes, th...
I often insist I’m not a list ticker, someone intent on claiming they’ve been to every country on earth although I do keep track of where I’ve been. I am, however, much closer to having put a footprint on every one of the USA’s 50 states. After my visit to Montana in ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013