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.
I’m travelling around the Congo – or rather around both Congos, the big ex-Belgian one (Democratic Republic of Congo) and the smaller ex-French one (Congo Republic, aka Congo Brazzaville). I started in Lubumbashi and continued to the capital Kinshasa. Next stop took m...
Montreal is the 3rd largest French speaking city in the world, Paris the 2nd. Number 1? That’s Kinshasa, stop two on my Congo Democratic Republic excursion. As a degree of stability returns to much of the country, railway lines reopen and roads are improved (often fro...
◄ The elephant statue in a roundabout is reckoned to be the centre of Lubumbashi I'm travelling around the Congos – both of them, the Congo Democratic Republic (aka Congo DRC), that’s the big bad one, and the Congo Republic (aka Congo Brazzaville), that’s the ex-Fr...
After my BMW visit to China in March I was invited to visit BMW’s headquarters in Munich, have a look around and find out about their new BMW i sub-brand for electric and hybrid cars which will launch in 2013. I’ve already got a hybrid car, a Toyota Prius, but to get ...
Jason Stearns’ book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tries to unpick the story of ‘The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa.’ Clearly a near impossible task, because you’re still left fairly bemused at the end how all these events – from the Cold War to t...
Patrick Leigh Fermor died on 10 June, at the age of 96. Of course I read Time of Gifts – the first part of his walk (as an 18 year old!) from England to Istanbul. And of course I loved it and over the years I’ve had other Fermor encounters. Last year, on our London-di...
There’s a new expression in our travel vocabulary: ‘range anxiety.’ You suffer range anxiety when you’re driving somewhere in an electric car and you worry that you may not get there before the battery runs flat. Electric cars are still in their early days but when...
‘It’s a narrowboat, not a barge (they carry coal), not a longboat (they carry Vikings), this is a narrowboat.’ That was my introduction to English canal travel quite a few years ago on a trip with my pre-teen (at the time) children. We travelled up the Avon River to S...
Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the subtitle of Kim Barker’s gonzo-journalistic account of seven years in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Having grown up in Montana and never really travelled she was clearly ideal material for the trouble-zone posting. First she...
▲ Erwin Wurm's Fat Car Maureen and I were in Tasmania with some friend just before Hobart’s amazing new MONA – Museum of Old & New Art – opened in January. It’s the creation of David Walsh who made his considerable fortune from gambling. Not that chasing-the-...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013