Our Story
A beat-up old car, a few dollars in the pocket and a sense of adventure. In 1972 that’s all Tony and Maureen Wheeler needed for the trip of a lifetime – across Europe and Asia overland to Australia. It took several months, and at the end – broke but inspired – they sat at their kitchen table writing and stapling together their first travel guide, Across Asia on the Cheap. Within a week they’d sold 1500 copies. Lonely Planet was born.
Today, Lonely Planet has offices in Franklin, London, Melbourne, Oakland, Beijing and Delhi, with more than 600 staff and writers. We share Tony’s belief that ‘a great guidebook should do three things: inform, educate and amuse’.
Our Writers
Benedict Walker
Ben had a suburban upbringing in Newcastle, Australia, and spent his weekends and long summers by the beach, whenever possible. Although he’s drawn magnetically to the kinds of mountains he encountered in the Rockies and the Japan and Swiss Alps, beach life is in his blood. To date he has contributed to Lonely Planet’s Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, USA and Vietnam guidebooks. Ben also wrote the Plan Your Trip, Understand and Survival Guide sections.
Kate Armstrong
Kate has spent much of her adult life traveling and living around the world. A full-time freelance travel journalist, she has contributed to around 40 Lonely Planet guides and trade publications and is regularly published in Australian and worldwide publications. She is the author of several books and children’s educational titles.
Brett Atkinson
Based in New Zealand, but frequently on the road for Lonely Planet, Brett’s a full-time travel and food writer specializing in adventure travel, unusual destinations, and surprising angles on more well-known destinations. Craft beer and street food are Brett’s favorite reasons to explore places.
Carolyn Bain
A travel writer and editor for more than 20 years, Carolyn has lived, worked and studied in various corners of the globe, including Denmark, London, St Petersburg and Nantucket. Carolyn writes about travel and food for a range of publishers; see carolynbain.com.au for more.
Amy C Balfour
Amy grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and now lives in the Shenandoah Valley in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A few of her favorite places between the Atlantic and the Appalachians include Sharp Top Mountain, Lexington, VA, Berlin, MD, and the New River Gorge. Amy has authored or co-authored more than 30 books for Lonely Planet, including USA, Eastern USA and Florida & the South’s Best Trips. Her stories have appeared in Backpacker, Sierra, Southern Living and Women’s Health.
Robert Balkovich
Robert was born and raised in Oregon, but has called New York City home for almost a decade. When he was a child and other families were going to theme parks and grandma’s house, he went to Mexico City and toured Eastern Europe by train. He’s now a writer and travel enthusiast seeking experiences that are ever so slightly out of the ordinary to report back on. Instagram: @oh_balky.
Ray Bartlett
Ray is a travel writer specializing in Japan, Korea, Mexico and the United States. He’s worked on many different Lonely Planet titles, starting with Japan in 2004 and going through to the present.
Loren Bell
When Loren first backpacked through Europe, he was in the backpack. That memorable experience corrupted his six-month-old brain, ensuring he would never be happy sitting still. When he’s not demystifying destinations for Lonely Planet, Loren writes about science and conservation news.
Greg Benchwick
A long-time Lonely Planet travel writer, Greg has rumbled in the jungles of Bolivia, trekked across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, interviewed presidents and grammy-award winners, dodged flying salmon in Alaska and climbed mountains (big and small) in between.
Andrew Bender
Award-winning travel and food writer Andrew has written three dozen Lonely Planet guidebooks (from Amsterdam to Los Angeles, Germany to Taiwan and more than a dozen titles about Japan), plus numerous articles for lonelyplanet.com.
Sara Benson
The author of more than 70 travel and non-fiction books, Sara’s writing has featured in national and international newspapers and magazines, including numerous Lonely Planet titles, CNN and National Geographic Adventure, as well as on popular travel websites such as Jetsetter.
Alison Bing
Over 10 guidebooks and 20 years in San Francisco, author Alison has spent more time on Alcatraz than some inmates, become an aficionado of drag and burritos, and willfully ignored Muni signs warning that safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation.
Catherine Bodry
Catherine is based in Anchorage, Alaska, but spends much time in Southeast Asia. As a writer, she’s covered Alaska, Thailand and China, among other destinations. A lover of mountains, she spends as much time as possible in or near hills, whether it’s running, hiking, camping, berry picking, rafting or just gazing at them.
Cristian Bonetto
Cristian has contributed to more than 30 Lonely Planet guides, while his musings on travel, food, culture and design appear in numerous publications around the world. When not on the road, you’ll find the reformed playwright and TV scriptwriter slurping espresso in his beloved hometown, Melbourne.
Celeste Brash
Celeste has been writing guidebooks for Lonely Planet since 2005 and her travel articles have appeared in publications from BBC Travel to National Geographic. She’s currently writing a book about her five years on a remote pearl farm in the Tuamotu.
Jade Bremner
Jade has been a journalist for more than a decade, and has edited travel magazines and sections for Time Out and Radio Times, and worked as a correspondent for the Times, CNN and the Independent. She feels privileged to share tales from this wonderful planet we call home and is always looking for the next adventure.
Nate Cavalieri
A writer and musician based in California, Nate has authored over a dozen titles for Lonely Planet, including Epic Bike Rides of the World. He’s cycled across China and Southern Africa as a guide with Tour d’Afrique and played third chair percussion in an Orlando theme park.
Gregor Clark
Gregor is a US-based writer whose love of foreign languages and curiosity about what’s around the next bend have taken him to dozens of countries on five continents. Chronic wanderlust has also led him to visit all 50 states and most Canadian provinces on countless road trips through his native North America. Since 2000, Gregor has regularly contributed to Lonely Planet guides.
Michael Grosberg
Michael has worked on over 45 Lonely Planet guidebooks. Whether covering Myanmar or New Jersey, each project has added to his rich and complicated psyche and taken years from his (still?) relatively young life. Prior to his freelance writing career, other international work included development on the island of Rota in the western Pacific; South Africa where he investigated and wrote about political violence and helped train newly elected government representatives; and Quito, Ecuador to teach. He received a Masters in Comparative Literature and taught literature and writing as an adjunct professor at several New York City area colleges.
Ashley Harrell
After a brief stint selling day spa coupons door-to-door in South Florida, Ashley decided she’d rather be a writer. She went to journalism grad school, convinced a newspaper to hire her, and starting covering wildlife, crime and tourism, sometimes all in the same story. Fueling her zest for storytelling and the unknown, she traveled widely and moved often, from a tiny NYC apartment to a vast California ranch to a jungle cabin in Costa Rica, where she started writing for Lonely Planet.
Alexander Howard
Alexander is the managing editor of the US edition of Lonely Planet Magazine. He began his work at Lonely Planet as a guidebook editor (and eventually writer) covering the Western US and Canada, a job that frequently took him on adventures including trekking into the lava fields of Hawai’i, piloting an aerobatic plane in Vegas and (until recently) being afraid of grizzlies.
Mark Johanson
Mark grew up in Virginia and has called five different countries home over the last decade. His travel-writing career began as something of a quarter-life crisis, and he’s happily spent the past eight years circling the globe reporting for Australian travel magazines (like Get Lost), British newspapers (like the Guardian), American lifestyles (like Men’s Journal) and global media outlets (like CNN and BBC). When not on the road, you’ll find him gazing at the Andes from his home in Santiago, Chile. Follow the adventure at www.markjohanson.com.
Adam Karlin
Adam has contributed to dozens of Lonely Planet guidebooks, covering an alphabetical spread that ranges from the Andaman Islands to the Zimbabwe Border. As a journalist, he has written on travel, crime, politics, archeology and the Sri Lankan Civil War. Adam is based out of New Orleans, which helps explain his love of wetlands, food and good music. Learn more at http://walkonfine.com.
Brian Kluepfel
Brian has worked for Lonely Planet across the Americas since 2006. He’s been the editor of the Bolivian Times in La Paz, a correspondent for Major League Soccer and a contributor to Frontier Airlines inflight magazine. His Lonely Planet adventures have taken him to Venezuela, Bolivia and even the pine barrens of New Jersey. His stories on Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and the mines of Potosi, Bolivia will feature in the Lonely Planet title Amazing Secret Marvels.
Stephen Lioy
Stephen is a photographer, writer, hiker and travel blogger. A ‘once in a lifetime’ Euro trip and post-university move to China set the stage for what would eventually become a semi-nomadic lifestyle. When Stephen isn’t at home in Kyrgyzstan, which is more often than not, he can usually be found leading very large tour groups of very small children or, in between work periods, out in the mountains sleeping in a tent and eating the sort of things your stomach warns you about. Follow Stephen’s travels at www.monkboughtlunch.com.
Carolyn McCarthy
Carolyn specializes in travel, culture and adventure in the Americas. She has written for National Geographic, Outside, BBC Magazine, Boston Globe and other publications. She has contributed to over 30 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, including for Colorado, Argentina, Chile, Panama, Peru and the Trekking in the Patagonian Andes guide. For more information, visit www.carolynmccarthy.org or follow her Instagram travels at @masmerquen.
Craig McLachlan
Craig has covered destinations all over the globe for Lonely Planet for two decades. Based in Queenstown, New Zealand for half the year, he runs an outdoor activities company and a sake brewery, then moonlights overseas for the other half, leading tours and writing for Lonely Planet. Describing himself as a ‘freelance anything’, Craig has an MBA from the University of Hawai’i and is also a Japanese interpreter, pilot, photographer, hiking guide, tour leader, karate instructor and budding novelist. Check out www.craigmclachlan.com.
Hugh McNaughtan
A former English lecturer, Hugh decided visa applications beat grant applications, and turned his love of travel into a full-time thing. Having also done a bit of restaurant reviewing in his home town (Melbourne, Australia), he’s now eaten his way across Europe and North America, and found the best way to work up an appetite for the USA’s great, gut-busting food is spending all day cycling through its stunning landscapes.
Becky Ohlsen
Becky is a freelance writer, editor and critic based in Portland, Oregon. She writes guidebooks and travel stories about Scandinavia, Portland and elsewhere for Lonely Planet. When she’s not covering ground for Lonely Planet, Becky is working on a book about motorcycles and the paradoxical appeal of risk.
Christopher Pitts
Chris’s first expedition in life ended in failure when he tried to dig from Pennsylvania to China at the age of six. He went on to study Chinese in university, living for several years in China. He spent more than a decade in Paris with his wife and two children before the lure of Colorado’s sunny skies and outdoor adventure proved too great to resist.
Liza Prado
Liza has been a travel writer since 2003, when she made a move from corporate lawyering to travel writing. She’s written dozens of guidebooks and articles to destinations throughout the Americas. She lives very happily in Denver, Colorado, with her husband and fellow writer, Gary Chandler, and their two kids.
Josephine Quintero
Josephine first got her taste of not-so-serious travel when she slung a guitar on her back and traveled in Europe in the early ’70s, along the way working on a kibbutz in Israel and meeting her husband. She primarily covers Spain and Italy for Lonely Planet.
Kevin Raub
Kevin grew up in Atlanta and started his career as a music journalist in New York, working for Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone magazines. A Georgia boy gone AWOL, he always appreciates coming home to the South for barbecue and brews. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram (@RaubOnTheRoad). To learn more about Kevin, check out www.lonelyplanet.com/members/kraub.
Simon Richmond
Journalist and photographer Simon has specialized as a travel writer since the early 1990s and first worked for Lonely Planet in 1999 on the Central Asia guide. He’s long since stopped counting the number of guidebooks he’s researched and written for the company, but countries covered including Australia, China, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar (Burma), Russia, Singapore, South Africa and Turkey. For Lonely Planet’s website he’s penned features on topics from the world’s best swimming pools to the joys of Urban Sketching.
Brendan Sainsbury
Originally from Hampshire, England, Brendan has traveled all over Alaska from Ketchikan in the south to Deadhorse in the north by bus, train, kayak, bicycle, ferry, airplane and his own two feet. Memorable moments have included taking a bus up the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks to the Arctic Ocean, catching a ferry through the off-the-grid Alaskan peninsula to the Aleutian Islands and running the Chilkoot trail in the footsteps of the Klondike ‘stampeders’ in a day. Brendan has contributed to over 50 Lonely Planet guides including six editions of Cuba.
Andrea Schulte-Peevers
Born and raised in Germany and educated in London and at UCLA, Andrea has traveled the distance to the moon and back in her visits to some 75 countries. She has earned her living as a professional travel writer for more than two decades and authored or contributed to nearly 100 Lonely Planet titles.
Adam Skolnick
Adam’s travel obsession bloomed while working as an environmental activist in the mid ’90s. These days he’s an award-winning journalist and travel writer who writes about travel, culture, human rights, sports and the environment for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Playboy, Outside, BBC.com, Wired, ESPN.com, and Men’s Health, and he’s authored or co-authored over 35 Lonely Planet guidebooks. He lives in Malibu, California.
Helena Smith
Helena is an award-winning writer and photographer covering travel, outdoors and food. Helena is from Scotland but was partly brought up in Malawi, so Africa always feels like home. She also enjoys living in multicultural Hackney and wrote, photographed and published Inside Hackney.
Regis St Louis
Regis grew up in a small town in the American Midwest – the kind of place that fuels big dreams of travel – and he developed an early fascination with foreign dialects and world cultures. He spent his formative years learning Russian and a handful of Romance languages, which served him well on journeys across much of the globe. Regis has contributed to more than 50 Lonely Planet titles, covering destinations across six continents. Follow him on www.instagram.com/regisstlouis.
Ryan Ver Berkmoes
Ryan has written more than 110 guidebooks for Lonely Planet. He grew up in Santa Cruz, California, which he left at age 17 for college in the Midwest, where he first discovered snow. All joy of this novelty soon wore off. Since then he has been traveling the world, both for pleasure and for work – which are often indistinguishable. He has covered everything from wars to bars. He definitely prefers the latter. Ryan calls New York City home. Read more at ryanverberkmoes.com and at @ryanvb.
John A Vlahides
John has been a cook in a Parisian bordello, luxury-hotel concierge, television host, safety monitor in a sex club, French–English interpreter and is one of Lonely Planet’s most experienced guidebook authors. When not talking travel, John sings with the San Francisco Symphony and spends free time in the Sierra Nevada.
Mara Vorhees
Born and raised in St Clair Shores, Michigan, Mara traveled the world (if not the universe) before settling in the Hub. The pen-wielding traveler covers destinations as diverse as Belize and Russia, as well as her home of New England. She lives in a pink house in Somerville, Massachusetts with her husband, two kiddies and two kitties.
Clifton Wilkinson
Clifton has been in love with California since first visiting in 1995. Christmases spent near Sacramento, bike rides across the Golden Gate Bridge and hiking in Yosemite National Park have all reinforced Clifton’s opinion that the Golden State is the best state in the whole US, and Santa Barbara is one of its most beautiful corners. Having worked for Lonely Planet for more than 11 years, he’s now based in the London office, but hoping for the call back to CA’s Sideways country and the chance to show that Merlot isn’t all that bad.
Luci Yamamoto
A fourth-generation native of Hawai’i, Luci is unfazed by rain, pidgin and long Hawaiian words. When she left law to be a writer, she heard the old adage: write what you know. For Lonely Planet she thus targeted the Hawaiian Islands. To her surprise, her kama’aina background was only a launchpad – and she discovered extraordinary new people and places on her home island. Currently a writer, editor, Iyengar yoga teacher, and blogger (www.yogaspy.com) in Vancouver, she regularly returns to Hawai’i and recharges her local ‘cred.’ Even more than papayas and poke, she loves the Big Island’s aloha spirit.
Karla Zimmerman
Karla lives in Chicago, where she eat doughnuts, yells at the Cubs, and writes stuff for books, magazines and websites when she’s not doing the first two things. She has contributed to 40-plus guidebooks and travel anthologies covering destinations in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and the Caribbean – all of which are a long way from the early days, when she wrote about gravel for a construction magazine and got to trek to places like Fredonia, Kansas. To learn more, follow her on Instagram and Twitter (@karlazimmerman).
Laura Pearson, Illinois; Trisha Ping, Michigan
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Published by Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd
ABN 36 005 607 983
10th edition - March 2018
ISBN 9781787019591
© Lonely Planet 2018 Photographs © as indicated 2018
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