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.
Bad Lands – my foray along the Axis of Evil, President George W Bush’s trio of Iran, Iraq and North Korea, plus six other ‘bad’ countries, was published in April 2007. A revised second edition came out in mid-2010 and I commented that remarkably little had changed: ‘T...
◄ When I rewrote the intro to Bad Lands for a recent reprint I noted that nothing much had changed, Fidel in Cuba, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, a mess in Iraq, no driving licences for women in Saudi Arabia, the generals in Burma, everywhere you looked it was no change....
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...
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...
J Maarten Troost’s recently published book on China, Lost on Planet China, seems to follow the Paul Theroux school of travel writing, the grumpier I am the better the experience. By the end I was a little fed up with his constant complaints about pollution, greedy ta...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013