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.
Alain Mabanckou teaches French literature at UCLA and is the author of a dozen novels and books of poetry in French. This one has been translated into English and follows the misadventures of an alcoholic school-teacher nicknamed Broken Glass drifting through life at ...
I spend a lot of nights in hotels – apart from camping, staying with friends, travel on boats, trains and planes and other excuses for being away from home. Last year that came to 116 nights in 61 different hotels. And of course there are inevitably some things I don’...
I’ve never been to Congo – to either of them, Republic of Congo (the ex-French one, capital Brazzaville) or Democratic Republic of Congo (the ex-Belgian Congo, ex-Zaire, capital Kinshasa), but they’re both on my list and I keep reading books about them. Of course t...
Judith Schalansky’s book was originally published in German and won design awards. It’s a delight, a weird and wonderful assortment subtitled ‘Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will.’ Each features a map and a short and often intriguing essay which migh...
Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2011 stirred up the usual interest on its release. Assorted cities (including Tel Aviv and Australia’s Newcastle – not the British version) noted their inclusion in the ‘Top 10 Cities’ category. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, vis...
I don’t have to go far to see the wildlife – feathered variety at least – at this time of year. They come up to my study windows, I can watch them as I type this. For the past month we’ve had an angry magpie attacking its reflection in windows all around the hous...
Don George in California regularly puts together travel writing anthologies for Lonely Planet and his latest collection follows that most important travel activity: eating. They’re all short tales, just a bite-sized mouthful each. My Moveable Feast favourites: • Ju...
▲ From 34km up it certainly looks like space Chris Lansell dreamed up the Melbourne Solar System along Melbourne’s bayside, it launched as a Planet Wheeler project in 2008. Recently Chris came up with another project, we’d send up a couple of cameras on a wea...
Criticising a book or a film without reading it or seeing it is never a good idea. But there are two recently released books, and from opposite ends of the political spectrum, which I’m not going to waste my time reading. First there’s George W Bush’...
▲ Crossing the Pacific in a Qantas A380, view from the tail-mounted Skycam How long before the Qantas fleet of A380 aircraft gets back into the air? They’ve been grounded since QF32 suffered an ‘uncontained engine failure’ on take-off from Singapore's Changi Airp...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013