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.
Our October trip from London to Australia was long and low so there were plenty of aerial views. Starting with our first stop on Jersey, just over an hour out of London’s Biggin Hill Airport. Jersey is one of the Channel Islands, close to the French coast, but British...
Aung San Suu Kyi is out. She’s spent 15 of the past 21 years in some form of detention, the last spell stretching back to 2003. Just over a year ago her most recent period of house arrest was extended by another 18 months because a crazy tourist had decided to swim ac...
Curiously at present this book only appears to be published in Australia, although Amazon.com have it on Kindle. Thomas Keneally is a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction titles although he’s best known for the Booker Prize winning Schindler’s Ark which became t...
Earlier this year I spoke at a hotel conference in Macau and listed 10 things I don’t like about hotels – I’ll put that list up on this site in the next week or two. Meanwhile I’m going to vent about my number one hotel dislike – inflated internet connection charge...
▲ A Qantas 747 taking off (seen from British Airway's Heathrow Terminal 5) Google ‘Qantas’, ‘engine failure’ and ’Singapore’ and you’ll follow a sorry tale. On 4 November a Qantas A380 (double decker Airbus) suffered an ‘uncontained’ engine failure as it climbed ...
I keep talking about visiting Congo and keep bumping into people with a Congo connection. I nominated the Zaire version (there are two Congo’s ‘Republic’ and ‘Democratic Republic,’ the Zaire one) as the place I really need to go to on the Jennifer Byrne book programme...
Almost 40 years ago, travelling across Asia Maureen and I flew from Calcutta to Thailand and we still remember the culture shock of arriving in Bangkok. Compared to India it was amazingly well lit, air-conditioned, orderly, efficient and clean. ▲ street cow in V...
The last leg of our multi-stop London to Australia flight didn’t start or end the way it was planned. In F-to-A 1 I wrote about the history of flying to Australia. F-to-A 2 went from London via Jersey, the south of France and Malta to the Greek island of Crete. F-to-A...
Twitchhiker (Paul Smith) is the second travel book this year which I have really not liked, To Hellholes & Back was the other. The premise: hitchhike from north England to the antipodal position on earth, Campbell Island off to the south of New Zealand. He does...
Our trip is taking 25 days and makes 22 stops along the way. It's organised by the small Australian operator Heron Airlines. My first posting on the trip was an introduction to the history of London to Australia by air. Flying to Australia 2 covered the trip from Lond...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013