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.
Favourite Souvenirs The Trash or Treasure – Souvenirs of Travel exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Sydney, Australia runs until 17 May 2009. I spoke at the museum in late July about my own souvenir collection. Of course wherever you go the perfect tacky so...
Last month Maureen and I travelled up to Liverpool (European Capital of Culture for 2008) for a little culture. We stayed at the Hard Day’s Night Hotel, visited the Beatles Story Museum, took the National Trust tour to John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s childhood ho...
A couple of weeks ago in London I saw the play (a solo performance by Vanessa Redgrave) of Joan Didion’s magical book The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she notes ‘the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.’ Less than two weeks ...
The British National Trust owns the homes just outside Liverpool where John Lennon and Paul McCartney lived when the Beatles first took off. Mendips was John Lennon’s home from 1945 (when he was 5 years old) right up to 1963 (when Please Please Me topped the British...
I love the imaginative variations hotels dream up for ‘do not disturb’ and ‘clean my room’ door hangers. Here are the ones from the new Hard Day’s Night Hotel in Liverpool. It’s right beside Mathew St, site of the Cavern Club where the Beatles performed 292 tim...
Nice definition? I’ve always enjoyed travelling to unusual places, like North Korea which I wrote about in my book Bad Lands. Recently I’ve been to Haiti and Colombia and you can read an essay I wrote on those sort of destinations in GOOD Magazine and check their sele...
The Science Museum in London has an exhibit running until 25 October called Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tech Britain. In the 1950s Dan Dare was a space travel comic strip hero who had a lot of British schoolboys of the era enthralled – I certainly was and so, acc...
I’ve done a few walking trips in Italy – through the mountains in the Dolomites, down the stunning stretch of coast at Cinque Terre, around the southern side of Mt Blanc (Monte Bianco in Italian) on the circuit of that famous mountain – and in May 2008 through souther...
The engineers of Victorian-era Britain were inclined to churn out inventions in all sorts of fields. Some of them are well known, in particular the heroically named Isambard Kingdom Brunel who turned his hand to everything from massive ocean liners to railway tunnel...
Before I visited Haiti earlier this year I did some reading about the country. The first discovery was that there’s not much on the shelves, we cover Haiti in our Caribbean Islands book and you can also download the Haiti chapter as a Pick & Mix PDF. In 1999...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013