THE PARACHUTE ARTIST.(Tony Wheeler)

On the evening after the rainiest summer day in Melbourne's history, Tony Wheeler's dinner guests, who were British, wanted to discuss the weather. Wheeler gradually redirected the conversation to the Falkland Islands. He had recently written a new Lonely Planet guide to the Falklands, and also one to East Timor, exactly the sort of backpacker destinations that he and his wife, Maureen, had in mind when they established Lonely Planet, in 1973, as the scruffy but valiant enemy of the cruise ship and the droning tour guide. The Wheelers' guests, who were touring Australia, were Roger Twiney, a flatmate of Tony's in England in the early seventies, and Roger's wife, Susanne. As both couples sat in the Wheelers' living room, watching the sun set across the Yarra River, Tony spoke of the Falklands' king and rockhopper penguins; of tracing Ernest Shackleton's footsteps on South Georgia Island; and of the peculiarities of the local "squidocracy," those grown rich from fishing the cephalopod mollusk.

"But isn't it cold, windy, inhospitable?" Roger asked.

"No, no!" Tony said. "It's just like Yorkshire."

"I'm from Yorkshire," Susanne said, with a don't-tell-me-about-Yorkshire tone.

"Well, the Falklands actually get less snow than your home region!" Tony replied, seeming confident that she would be as delighted by this arresting fact as he was. Susanne fell silent.

A slight, graying man of fifty-eight, Tony Wheeler is at least two people. Tony No. 1, who goes to the office every day in subfusc clothing and carries a passport from his native Britain, is so self-contained that he appears, as a colleague puts it, "almost socially retarded." When he gave me a tour of Lonely Planet's head office, in Melbourne, not one of the three hundred eager twenty- and thirty-somethings who work there greeted him as he passed. "I met Tony in our Oakland office a few years ago and I expected him to be this huge presence, this Tony Robbins of travel," Debra Miller, a Lonely Planet author, says. "But he's sort of the Woody Allen of travel."

Like one of those dehydrated sponges which inflate to astonishing size when dropped into their proper element, Wheeler becomes a vastly different and more voluble person when he's on a trip (or recalling or anticipating a trip). This is Tony No. 2, who carries a passport from his adopted Australia. Tony No. 2 and Maureen and I were leaving the next day for the Sultanate of Oman. They were then going on to Ethiopia, and later this year Wheeler planned to visit Macau, Shanghai, Singapore, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Iceland, and Japan, and to sweep from Cape Town to Casablanca by air safari.