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.
▲ Looking past a gargoyle from the Notre Dame tower across the Seine and Left Bank towards the Eiffel Tower In 1996 I lived in Paris for the whole year and most days walked from our apartment on Rue Saint-Paul in the Marais across the Seine River to the Lonely Plan...
Head out to the north-west of the Australian state of Victoria and you come to a lot of flat farmland, dotted with a scatter of small towns – country towns in the Australian parlance. The area is known as the Mallee and part of it as the Wimmera. They’re regions that ...
Books by Paul Theroux are always more readable when Mr Theroux is unhappy – grumpy even – and in Deep South he finds plenty to be annoyed about. It’s unusual for a Theroux book – a fact that he points out more than once – that it isn’t a linear (or circular) journey, ...
Late last year I travelled by boat from Esperance in Western Australia out to Middle Island in the Recherche Archipelago to see its famous (if little visited) pink Lake Hillier. Why did I bother, right now I can drive to Melbourne’s equally pink lake in 15 minutes or ...
My next book, Tony Wheeler’s Islands of Australia, is coming from the National Library in Canberra in October. Working on this title has certainly extended my knowledge about Australia’s 8222 islands and I’ve managed to visit quite a few more of them. I’ve reported re...
▲ Back in 2015 I went to Belfast to see Van Morrison perform Cyprus Avenue – his wonderful 1968 track from Astral Weeks – on Cyprus Avenue. I’d already seen him run through Astral Weeks, that classic favourite, at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2009. In 2015 it w...
There’s a lot of talk about the causes of the two 737 Max crashes – Lion Air on 29 October 2018 (157 deaths) and Ethiopian Airlines on 10 March 2019 (189 deaths). Two thoughts and one case of déjà vu, that handy French expression which means ‘we’ve been here before.’ ...
Flying from Dubai to Baku in Azerbaijan late last year a wonderful view of Iran’s snow-capped Mt Damavand popped up in my Fly Dubai 737 window. ▲ A few months later (ie just a week or two ago), flying from London to Singapore there it was again, this time I was fly...
Of course the skies are currently empty of Boeing 737 Max aircraft, but as a result of the recent India-Pakistan dispute, from Wednesday 27 February Pakistan closed its airspace to commercial flights. All those flights between Europe and South-East Asia – Bangkok, Kua...
We often have birds nesting in our courtyard in Australia, it’s totally enclosed so they’re safe from cats and other intruders. The last few years it has been blackbirds, which are an exotic, ie not a native Australian bird. This year they produced not one, but three ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013