Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder. It's Monday the night of March.

And it's now just over a week since we came to terms with the idea that airspace in the gulf at the

key hubs of Abu Dhabi, Doha, and in particular, Dubai, was going to be shut down.

It's been a really worrying time since then.

We've had incidents across the weekend, and airspace closed intermittently, spreading now to

re-ad in Saudi Arabia.

I wanted to talk to probably the one person who can put this

in a kind of historical travel perspective. He is Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet,

the guidebook giant that was created in the 1970s. And over the next three days, you will be able to

hear our conversation, but we're starting with the effects of the Iranian revolution in 1979,

and how that affected travel around the world just at the time when Lonely Planet was trying to promote travel around the world.

It certainly shut down the hippie trail, the overland trip, because you couldn't do that anymore.

And it was simultaneous almost with the Russians invading Afghanistan.

So Iran shut down because of the Ayatollah and the Shah being booted out,

and then Afghanistan shut down because the Russians had marched in and taken over there.

But you didn't fly over that so much in those days. So the sort of chaos that we're

feeling today due to airline flights shutting down wasn't a story so much. Moving on to the 1990s,

the Gulf War in 1991 also brought international aviation to a kind of crisis point.

I recall some flights from the UK to Australia are actually being rooted via Nairobi in Kenya.

I don't remember that, but I can imagine it.

There's certainly been areas that have been shut down periodically.

And in fact, if you go back to the 70s, I guess, you know, if you were going from Bangkok to

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