Travel Guru Advice: Best isn't Fancy, Packing Light, Top Places to Visit, Reasons to Travel and Bad Lands

Advice From a Travel Guru

A few weeks ago, I got to sit down with Tony Wheeler, who founded the ubiquitous, quasi-biblical Lonely Planet series of guidebooks. He never expected the franchise (which BBC bought out last year) to be the juggernaut that it is today—it started when he and his wife tried to get from London to Afghanistan overland and ended up in Sydney, and then decided to write about it. (The first book, about Asia, was also supposed to be called “Lovely Planet,” but a typo led to the name we all know now.) He had a couple of tips for Hong Kong travelers, so here goes:

The Best Hotels Aren’t Always the Fanciest

Clearly, Wheeler doesn’t need to travel “on a shoestring” anymore, but he maintains that the best accommodation doesn’t always come with the highest price tag. At the end of the year, he likes to take stock. “What was the most expensive hotel [I stayed in] and what was the cheapest hotel?” he asks himself, and then evaluates their value for money. “The cheapest thing [this year] was a mission guesthouse I stayed at in the Solomon Islands. I think it was 12 or 15 [US] dollars a night.”

Pack Light

Being on the road isn’t the same as working at an office—you’re not seeing the same people day after day. Wheeler holds you only need to bring one shirt to wear, one shirt for the next day, and a third that can hang in the bathroom drying after a hand-wash for the day after. “If you need a fourth shirt, go out and buy it,” he says. “Pack your bag, reopen it, throw half the stuff out and take twice as much money.”