Lonely Planet's Tony Wheeler: My Travel Hotspots

How important do you think the internet will be for the travel industry now and in the future?

It will continue to grow, in part because a younger generation is always much more wired than an older one. So the backpackers who are always booking hostels on the internet now will inevitably go on to always booking 5-star hotels on the internet as they get older.

Ditto for anything else they aren't doing now, but will as they get older and more affluent, trading sharing rides to renting cars and so on.

What was your worst holiday experience ever?

Years ago, before mobile phones and internet cafes, I was in Indonesia, phoned home one day to say I was fine and then was totally out of communication for the next 10 days.

A few hours after I'd called the news came through that my younger brother had died, a heart attack at 37 years of age. By the time I was next in touch I'd missed everything including his funeral and I've never been forgiven for that. Today, of course, there are very few places in the world where you could be out of touch like that.

Do you always go backpacking or adventuring, or do you sometimes enjoy a beachy package holiday?

I'm not locked in to anything; often extremes pop up in the same trip. One week you're in the wilds and hanging out for the next shower and some clean clothes, and then you're in some luxurious boutique hotel.

But my only recent experience of a 'beachy package holiday' was a disaster. We'd arranged to meet Maureen's brother and his family at a beach-package-place in the Canary Islands and after about 48 hours couldn't stand it any longer, rented a car and drove around the island for the rest of the stay.

When we came back to the package hotel room the stuff we'd left was still sitting there untouched and unmoved, certainly nobody had reported that we'd been missing for the past week.

Although I've certainly done some package trips which you really couldn't do any other way, a boat trip that started at Valparaiso in Chile and went via Easter Island, Pitcairn Island and a bunch of other weird and wonderful islands to Tahiti for example. When I went to North Korea that was a package trip, and a stranger bunch of package tourists you couldn't ask to meet.

What would you say are the top five off-the-beaten-track places around the world people have to see and why?

Oh, quickly, here's five, not necessarily 'the' five, however:

1. Mali in Africa. If Rajasthan is India with extra colour and noise, Mali is ditto for Africa.
2. Western Tibet - until they build the planned airport in Ali. Meanwhile it's one of the places where you're a week's solid driving from the nearest airport, and places like Tsaparang are eye-opening, while the three day walk around Mt Kailash wipes clean a whole lifetime's sins according to the Tibetans.
3. Anywhere that has managed to scare visitors away due to trouble, political or otherwise. Haiti in the Caribbean is a good example.
4. Lots of places in the Pacific where transport difficulties cut the visitor numbers. Even Tahiti (which is easy to get to) has island groups like the Marquesas where visitors are surprisingly infrequent.
5. Albania - wild and wonderful country, some beautiful old towns like Gjirokaster, Roman and Greek ruins and nobody has realised it's no longer a danger zone.

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