By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
Melbourne has a new subway line – the Metro Tunnel – running through five new stations and currently having a soft opening, before the schedule launches full tilt on 1 February 2026. The new Parkville Station will probably be the most useful new station, since it’s at the University of Melbourne which badly needed a handy Metro station.
▲ The Town Hall Station
The two new central city stations might look slightly redundant since the Town Hall Station is only a couple of hundred metres from Flinders St Station and the State Library Station is right beside the Melbourne Central Station. In fact you might find it easier to enter the State Library Station from Melbourne Central rather than from its own entrance. The Metro Tunnel line, however, runs in a different direction than the other lines through Flinders St and Melbourne Central.
Unfortunately to use the new line you still need the horrible old Myki Card. Transport Victoria have announced that they are introducing ‘tap and go’ technology to Melbourne. Tomorrow? No, they are testing it in 2026 and at some point in the future you’ll actually be able to use it. But didn’t they start testing it in 2023 at some stations? Well yes they did, but clearly three years of testing wasn’t enough, there’s more testing to be rolled out in 2026
◄ My hated Myki Card
Hasn’t anybody asked them about this before? Well yes, for one person I asked Transport Victoria why we couldn’t use contactless cards in Melbourne when London introduced the technology in 2014. So that’s 10 years ago.
And I did get an answer, ‘we’re working on it and hope to introduce it soon.’ Which in Melbourne seems to be in 10 years time. So for over 10 years I’ve been able to use my Australian ANZ credit card to pay for public transport in London, England. But not in Melbourne, Australia. Absurd isn’t it?
Once upon a time Melbourne was a regular ‘most liveable city in the world’ title holder. How could you be a ‘most liveable city’ and at the same time operate the world’s most-visitor-unfriendly-travel-card? I suggested that in 2013 and 13 years later my opinion hasn’t changed. Never mind, the new Metro Tunnel Line reportedly took lots of lessons from London’s very popular Elizabeth Line. In London I often use the Elizabeth Line even if it means travelling a bit further because it’s so fast and convenient. Perhaps Melbourne can also learn from London how to get rid of the Myki Card.
▲ The Elizabeth Line at Bond St.in London
Since it opened in 2022 the Elizabeth Line quickly became the busiest railway line in the UK although technically it’s not part of the London Underground network. It runs out to Heathrow Airport – but so does the Piccadilly Line – and even further to Reading. It’s popular and has won architectural awards as well as being so busy. Check my August 2024 posting about riding the London Tube.
I’m running through some travel lists for 2008, in the past four days I’ve ticked off interesting hotels, my best music experiences, great flights and cars & drives. There were lots of interesting museums, galleries and exhibitions during 2008 and that’s today’s t...
I’m running through my travel lists for 2008, we started with interesting hotels, moved on to best music experiences, and then the views out the window from my favourite flights. Today it’s cars and drives. I didn’t cover a lot of distance by road in 2008. There w...
I'm running through my travel lists of 2008. I've started with some interesting hotels I stayed at in 2008 and my best music experiences for the year. Today I'm moving on to interesting flights. During 2008 in London I saw the play (a solo performance by Vaness...
Electric violinist Sally Jo of Saharadja plays in Ubud, Bali I'm running through my travel lists of 2008, yesterday I started with 10 Hotels, today it's Music. Music in 2008 included seven operas, a play about music and a music cruise along the Great Barrier Re...
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll post some lists of my travel favourites over the last year. Books, movies, flights, views, photographs, drives, transport, exhibits – and we’ll start with 10 interesting hotels from the past year. Ten hotels in ascending order of ...
I spent a few days in Moscow before I went to Kazakhstan to see a ‘space tourist’ go into orbit and made a tour of some of the cities finest subway stations. Many of them are real works of art, dating from Stalin’s 1930s heyday. The Walking Tours section of our Moscow...
I’ve got a week and a half, 1,200km (750 mile) bicycle ride coming up in Africa next year – starting on 22 March at Iringa in Tanzania and ending on 1 April at Lilongwe in Malawi. It’s stage five of the Tour d’Afrique, a four month long 12,000km (7,500 mile) jaunt fro...
On the evening of Monday 1 December I stepped out of my back door in Melbourne, Australia, glanced up at the sky soon after dark and was treated to this view. The three brightest objects in the night sky – the moon, Venus and Jupiter – were all close together. I d...
I’m always delighted to encounter a scam which unrolls precisely the way it’s scripted. Like the warning on page 224 of our Moscow city guide that the streets are not ‘paved with money.’ On my recent visit to Moscow I’m crossing a pedestrian underpass which eme...
At the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali last month I did a Wanderlust travel panel with three other writers and a women in the audience drew us: • Jamie James – chairs the session, a former New Yorker writer who now runs a restaurant in Seminyak, along the coast fro...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013