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.
◄ 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....
‘A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa’ is the subtitle of this page-turner of a history. The Greed is down to King Leopold, the Belgian horror story, who grabbed a large tranche of central Africa and ran it ruthlessly as his personal colony. The Ter...
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...
Hardly surprisingly I read a lot of travel or travel related books, some recent titles 1. Dictators’ Homes (Dictator Style in the USA) – Peter York Amazon USA - Amazon UK Unfortunately the idea – let’s do an Architectural Digest tour of assorted dictators’ and d...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013