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.
A few years ago I travelled London to Melbourne in about 28 days, all of it on flights of just an hour or two by Low Cost Carriers, airlines like Ryanair, easyJet, Pegasus, Fly Dubai, IndiGo or Air Asia. Now I’ve just arrived in London from Melbourne, a trip that t...
As if global warming and climate change wasn’t a big enough problem for our fragile planet we’re compounding the problem with Our Dark Materials – Black Carbon & the Himalayas. Ashley Crowther follows the sad story from the creation of black carbon – soot – on the...
It’s a 35 square km patch of Pacific Island, green and lush and about 1600km north-east of Sydney or 1100km north-west of Auckland. The population is a bit over 2000, many of them claiming descent from the Bounty Mutineers who, after kicking William Bligh off HMS Boun...
The Melbourne daily newspaper The Age asked me to say what summer in the city meant to me. So now that summer is almost over – down here in the southern hemisphere – here it is, my Melbourne Summer. What does a Victorian/Melbourne summer mean to you? – it’s so easy...
In the 22 December 2022 issue of The New York Review of Books, talking about art and architecture, Martin Filler praised New York City’s High Line: ‘a collaboration among the landscape firm James Corner Field Operations, the horticulturist Piet Oudolf, and the archite...
The Aranui 5 is probably the most iconic cruise ship in the South Pacific, except it isn’t a cruise ship. From the bow back to the bridge it’s clearly a cargo vessel, then from the bridge to the stern It’s equally clearly a cruise ship. Something went seriously wrong ...
◄ UK (and Australian) edition of Imagine a City You couldn’t ask for a more literary pilot to have up at the sharp end of your next flight than Mark Vanhoenacker. A British Airways 787 pilot he’s the author of Skyfaring, a wonderful introduction to the magic and my...
Three years ago I wrote Tony Wheeler’s Islands of Australia for the National Library of Australia. It was a wonderful project to be involved with, starting with the discovery (why didn’t I know?) that Australia has more than 8,000 islands. More than the 28 nations and...
◄ Plane trees in Prince’s Gardens, London Sitting in the outside dining area of Ognisko, a wonderful Polish restaurant on Exhibition Rd in London, just across from the Science Museum, we were admiring the 21 notable plane trees in Prince’s Garden, well 21 mature on...
Jody Rosen’s delightful history-of-the-bicycle book Two Wheels Good was a big hit in 2022. Check the enthusiastic review in The Economist. Highlights for me include the up and down history of the bicycle in China. Owning a bicycle was part of every good Communist’s...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013