WHEN a young couple decided to go on a backpacking adventure with nothing but £400 in their pockets, they had no idea how they would soon change the world.
Back in 1972, Tony and Maureen Wheeler went on a journey of ups and downs to get from London to the shores of Australia in six months without spending thousands.
And once they got there, they started a simple side hustle: writing a travel book called Across Asia on the Cheap.
It was the first book in the Lonely Planet series of travel guides. And this company eventually became a publishing empire with over 150 million guidebooks.
It was sold for a reported £130 million at the end of the 2000s, according to BBC News.
And today, Tony, 76, and Mauren, 73, live in a spacious Kensington mews house in London with a legacy behind them.
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Speaking to The Times, Tony explained that at the time, they had heard of the ‘hippy trail’ which went from Dam Square in Amsterdam to Kathmandu in Nepal. They thought they could do it, too.
They bought a second hand minivan for £50 and set off on their adventure, going from London to Holland to Turkey.
They then travelled to Iran and Afghanistan, where they sold the car and “winged it from there”.
While there were no guidebooks for people looking to make the journey on the cheap, the pair met travellers along the way who would give them tips on where to stay and how to get from point A to B.
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“So you took notes – and Tony is one of the world’s great note-takers,” Maureen explained.
Following Pakistan, India, Nepal and southeast Asia, the couple reached Bali, where they finally started running low on the £400 they had brought with them.
Luckily, they met a New Zealander who was looking for people to help him crew his 37ft yacht to Australia.
The six-day trip ended up taking 16 days and they ran out of food and fuel before getting caught in a storm.
Somehow, they made it to a beach on the North West Cape of Australia, where they walked down a dirt road before being picked up by a passing road crew to travel 80 miles to the nearest town before making it to Sydney.
“We assumed we’d work for three months and save enough money to get back to London,” Tony explained.
But the idea of a book eventually formed and the pair set about writing it in between working. In October 1973, they were finally finished and managed to sell 1,500 copies of the 96-page book to local bookshops.
Realising they were onto something, they quickly started researching a second book, this time to southeast Asia. When that sold well too, they decided to recruit freelance authors and eventually the company was born.
The company, which birthed a whole new genre, continued to expand over the years as did Maureen and Tony’s family.
While Maureen stayed mostly home in Melbourne to raise their kids, Tony continued to travel a bit to research more guidebooks and paid himself “a good six-figure salary”.
The business was confirmed to have become quite successful in 2007 when they sold it to BBC Worldwide for a reported £130 million, according to BBC News. The majority of the sale went to the Wheelers.
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Today, the couple are proud of what they achieved, even in the age where people use smartphones over guidebooks.
And while Maureen does little travelling, Tony continues to go abroad and has already visited 23 countries in 2023 with no plans of stopping.
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