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.
Those bloody Iranians. They’ve currently got three Australians imprisoned – two of them (like me) British-Australian dual nationals. Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert – a Middle East politics specialist at Melbourne University – was arrested in 2018 and has been held in Tehran’s...
I’ve just posted on my recent travels across Armenia – part 1 and part 2. My trip, however, started and finished in Yerevan, the country’s busy and bright capital city. ◄ Any understanding of modern Armenia has to start with a visit to the Armenian Genocide Memoria...
From Noravank I drove a long way east to Goris where I spent the night and then backtracked and made the winding ascent to Tatev. You can also get up there by the Wings of Tatev Cablecar which gets its place in the records books as ‘the world’s longest non-stop revers...
In the west we tend to forget that after its birth in Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem and those other Holy Land sites in what is today Israel and Palestine, Christianity moved east long before it moved west into Europe. The wonderful churches and monasteries of Armenia...
I certainly know a lot more about pigeons after reading Jon Day’s Homing – on pigeons, dwellings & why we return. First of all that the feral versions are not just ‘rats with wings’ and the homing version which Jon writes about are quite amazing. They’re synanthro...
▲ The Herschel House in Bath Lonely Planet have a new book coming up on trail blazing women and particular places associated with their stories. Like Caroline Herschel I suggested and took the train from London to Bath to visit the Herschel Museum of Astronomy at 1...
◄ Back in 1955, so 64 years ago, two Land-Rovers from Oxford and Cambridge Universities set out from The Grenadier pub in London’s Belgravia district, not too far from Harrods and Harvey Nicks, to drive to Singapore. That turned into a TV programme and a classic trave...
▲ The 'capital' city of Norway's far northern island group of Svalbard takes its colourful name from John Munro Longyear, the American pioneer of Svalbard coal mining in 1906. ▲ Visitors come to Svalbard in search of polar bears and the first one confronts you befo...
▲ The wonderful old trams in Milan, this one rolling in to the Piazza della Scala. ▲ And some much more modern Italian transport, the high speed Frecciarossa (Red Arrow) about to zip off from Milan to Bologna. ▲ You can't get away from him, an Ed Sheeran concer...
There’s something about being pleasantly surprised by an unexpected encounter, blown away by something you simply did not expect, discovering a place you really did not know about. Now I am a sucker for interesting mosaics – check my Cyprus in the Mediterranean postin...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013