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.
◄ My shadow and my fold-up-Brompton bicycle beside Lake Burley Griffin in Australia’s capital Canberra. I was in Canberra to do a talk for the government’s Intellectual Property Australia organization, brought my bicycle with me and did something I’ve been meaning to ...
Lined up beside the luggage carousel at the Qantas domestic side of Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport were these wire cages containing – it would appear – the abandoned baby strollers from February, March and April. ▼ What’s up? Did passengers get fed up of waiting...
Recently Maureen and I visited the National Library of Australia in Canberra, a visit which included a spell in their map department looking at some very interesting maps. ▲ Looking at maps in the National Library’s map room We looked at an Indian Ocean naviga...
The Camino de Santiago de Compostela – the pilgrim trail across northern Spain, ending up in the north-west corner of the country – has become enormously popular in recent years. In fact it’s probably the country’s number one tourist attraction. Cover enough km on foo...
◄ The Faisaliah Tower in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The tower was designed by UK architect Sir Norman Foster and built by the bin Laden family’s construction company. After all the talk about Osama bin Laden hiding out in a cave in the unpoliced badlands along the Pakis...
Sub-titled ‘The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them,’ this is a great book. The foolish author foolishly get interested in the story of the c...
▲ Security in Gunhill is clearly a concern as this typical array of signs on a Gunhill villa shows. Before I left Zimbabwe I had a drive around the flash Harare suburb looking for one of the city’s most famous residents – Haile Mariam Mengistu. ◄ In his book Zanz...
Robert Mugabe’s economic incompetence has done enormous damage to Zimbabwe, leading to huge unemployment, a massive exodus of Zimbabweans (millions of black Zimbabweans, tens of thousands of white ones), a dramatic decline in life expectancy and the conversion of ‘the...
◄ I didn’t see all the big five (elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, leopard), but leopard was the only one missing on my brief visit to Zimbabwe. In other countries in Africa the rules are that you must stay (safely) in your vehicle. In Zimbabwe if you want to get out an...
You can trash a reputation in a flash, it takes a long time to rebuild it. Robert Mugabe pretty much managed to destroy Zimbabwe’s economy and in the process chased away most of the country’s tourists. He did such a comprehensive job of wrecking things nobody has noti...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013