TONY WHEELER famously started the Lonely Planet travel guide series in 1973 after embarking from London in a minivan, driving through the “hippie backpacker trail” in Asia and finally arriving in Sydney, where he and his wife Maureen had 27 cents left between them. After selling the Lonely Planet enterprise for US$133 million in 2007 to the BBC, Wheeler, 66, no longer needs to travel on the cheap.

    Nevertheless, he took 22 different budget airline flights earlier this year from London to Melbourne, Australia, on a monthlong reprise of his first epic journey.

    It wasn’t nearly as romantic — the cramped airplane seats, tedious airport security and delays — “but I enjoyed it, I really did,” Wheeler said in an interview on the sidelines of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on the Indonesian island of Bali last weekend.

    His new book, which is not yet published, also looks back at the history of air travel in the region and chronicles the startling growth of budget airlines and the characters that started them.

    Wheeler and Maureen started the guidebooks based on the diaries of his original trip. The books, originally pitched toward the young baby boomer backpack generation that was discovering Asia, changed over time.

    “The early books we wrote for ourselves. And then as we got older and wealthier and had kids, the books changed with us. It wasn’t a deliberate policy. We changed and the books changed, too.” Wheeler said he was bitterly disappointed with how BBC handled Lonely Planet.

    (SD-Agencies)