The Ultimate Two-Wheeler

The godfather of backpackers, Tony Wheeler, talks travel and Lonely Planet with JAMES WALLMAN

"We’ll be back in a year,” announced Tony and Maureen Wheeler, then 25 and 21, as they set off from Tony’s parents’ house on 4 July 1972. But, a year later, they were still travelling. They’d printed and sold their first guidebook, Across Asia on the Cheap, and started the business that was to define backpacker travel for generations – Lonely Planet.

Now, more than three decades and 500 guidebooks later, the couple have finally sold up the business – reports say for £40 million – and they’ve just published an autobiography/travel/business book, The Lonely Planet Story: Once While Travelling.

As you’d expect, Tony has a lot of travel stories to pick from when he gets to talking about his life. When asked to give a potted history, he has something to say about about life, love, the movies – oh, and he knows a thing or two about bmibaby’s destinations too.

On meeting Maureen (they met on a bench in Regent’s Park, London)
“I sometimes say to Maureen: ‘If you hadn’t gone to that park… If it hadn’t been raining… Where would we and Lonely Planet be today?’ Who knows? But we just had a connection, you know? We just started talking and we never stopped. We went to the movies last night and we talked all the way through.”

On starting Lonely Planet
“Every time we went to a party people would ask us how we’d reached Australia .‘What’s Bali like?’ ‘Is Afghanistan dangerous?’ ‘Can you really reach Europe from Australia overland?’ We started scribbling down notes and lists for people and then we thought, instead of giving it away, why didn’t we sell this information? We didn’t have time to get a publishing deal – we were in a hurry to go travelling – so I drew the maps and we printed it ourselves.”

On work
“It expands to fill the space you allow it.”

On inspiration and tattoos
“I’ve been inspired by Victorian-era explorers such as Joseph Banks, the naturalist who went with Cook on his voyage to the Pacific and Australia. He was an extremely open-minded person. And when he saw natives’ tattoos in Tahiti, he got one too. The story goes that for the rest of his life, he’d roll his sleeve up in polite London society to show it off.

“I don’t have a tattoo but my mother does. She got it in her eighties but I couldn’t tell you where or what it is. She’s never showed it to me.”

On souvenirs
“My house is full of odds and ends I’ve brought home. Souvenir is French for ‘to remember’, so a souvenir is all about the story behind it.

“My favourite is a reclining wooden Buddha that I got in Malaysia when I was there with my friend the photographer Richard I’Anson. It had started to rain so we ducked into the nearest shop, and that turned out to be an antiques shop. Fortunately, I saw the Buddha first”

On Rome
“The most recent time I was in Rome, a journalist who’d interviewed me called me up on the last morning I was there and said: ‘You’ve got to see Rome the proper way – from the back of my Vespa!’ We raced down streets the wrong way, stopped for a slice of pizza and stood for a coffee at an espresso bar. It’s definitely the best way to see the city – at high speed on two wheels.”

On Krakow
“Krakow looks like they made the postcard and then made the city. But what I like best about the place is that its two most famous citizens couldn’t be further apart – Roman Polanski and the Pope.”

On Mick Jagger
“Mick Jagger once said that if he hadn’t been a rock star he’d have been a guidebook writer. When I heard this, I told my team to contact him and give this guy a job, but he never did write for us. When the Rolling Stones were in Asia on tour, though, Mick asked to meet Thailand’s Lonely Planet writer and our local author, Joe Cummings, showed Mick ’round Bangkok.”

On Irish pubs
“Ireland had just won the Eurovision song contest and I was at the bar in a great little pub near Cork with a traditional Irish band playing spoons.

‘They’re really good,’ someone nearby said to the barman.

‘You think so?’ he replied, without looking up from pouring a pint of Beamish. ‘Well, they’re French. But they spend their holidays here, playing our music up and down the country.’”

On Lonely Planet: The Movie and BrSad Pitt
“I don’t know if we’ll make the story into a movie. We’ve talked about it and even had some meetings in Hollywood. But in the movie they wanted Maureen and me to break up, then meet somewhere and have our love re-kindled. If we ever do make the movie, I’d have Brad Pitt play me – although I’m told I look more like Woody Allen.”

The Lonely Planet Story: Once SWhile Travelling is available for £9.99 from Crimson Publishing (www.crimsonpublishing.co.uk)