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....
▲ 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...
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...
I’m just back from a very interesting couple of weeks in Zimbabwe – visitors are starting to return, travel is easy and I had absolutely no problems there. Things may have got better in the last couple of years but as Douglas Rogers' alternately horrifying and hilario...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013