Jim Eagles: Turning the terror aside

Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler is thinking about taking a holiday in Afghanistan sometime soon. That's not because he thinks it's perfectly safe - "clearly it isn't" - although security has improved to the extent that hotels and bus services are starting to reopen, a trickle of tourists is arriving and Lonely Planet has a researcher there working on a guide book.

It's more to make the point that you can't allow fear of terrorists or strange diseases to dictate your life or your travel plans.

"Those things can happen anywhere," he says. "If a bomb can go off in the train system in London it can go off in the train system in Melbourne [where the Wheelers live].

"If you're going to only go to places where there's no risk at all, you'll never go anywhere.

"I'm going to ignore the risk. If it exists, then it's my own responsibility. I'm going to continue going to places I want to go to."

And that includes Afghanistan.

Tony and Maureen Wheeler are enthusiastic globetrotters and passionate advocates of the positive power of international travel.

They have stepped back from day-to-day involvement in the guidebook company they started 30 years ago and they certainly intend to use the extra spare time to keep on exploring the planet.

"I love travelling," Maureen says. "The reason is a bit hard to explain, but it's basically that I love the sense of possibilities. There's always something new when you're travelling.

"Your senses are alive because it is all so different, you never know what's going to happen, you don't know how the day's going to end up, and there's the constant possibility of the unexpected."

Like Tony, she refuses to accept that the possibility of something bad happening is a reason not to travel.

She took their two children through Nepal, India and Sri Lanka when they were both toddlers, "though I had people telling me I was insane, that they'd get some awful disease and die.

"Obviously, I would have felt terrible if anything happened to either of them. But to me, to lead your life on the basis that you could be unlucky somewhere and to try to stay safe, would be a very limiting thing to do."

The Wheelers also reject the idea that some countries should be boycotted because their rulers are beyond the pale.

Lonely Planet has refused to bow to a campaign to stop publishing guidebooks on Myanmar (formerly Burma) because of the awful nature of the military regime. As Tony puts it, "I believe it's important that people visit these places and see for themselves what they're like."

He adds, "If you're looking for an example of a place that's absolutely horrible, that treats its people with utter disrespect, I'd say North Korea is a good example.

"But then again I've been to North Korea and I wouldn't discourage anyone from going there. Obviously, if you do go you'll only see a very sanitised version of what it's like but you are getting a little peep behind the curtain."

One of the reasons for their enthusiasm is that they both believe it's good for people to see other cultures and different ways of living.

"I know it could sound very glib," says Maureen, "but the older I get and the more I travel and the longer I've been in the business, the more convinced I've become that travel is one of the few ways that people's boundaries and expectations and prejudices and the limitations they put on their own thinking can be changed."

As an example, she points to the remarkably generous response of New Zealanders and Australians to the Boxing Day tsunami. She ascribes the generosity to the fact that so many New Zealanders and Australians have been there.

"You know, when a name pops up on the news and there's been a disaster - Somalia, say - if you don't really know anything about it, except maybe you think it's somewhere in Africa, then it doesn't really register.

"But when the place in the news is Thailand, and you've been there, you love the people and you love the country, you feel you have a connection with the place, so you listen to the news and you want to do something about it ... and people did."