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.
The ban on tablets, laptops and digital cameras introduced on 21 March from an assortment of Middle East airports covers anything bigger than 9.3cm (3.6 inches) by 16cm (6.3 inches) by 1.5 cm (0.6 inches). That lets in most big smart phones, but cuts out Kindles and I...
Take an Uber car from Kensington to St Pancras to meet some friends for dinner one night, the fare is £13. Coming back we go in a traditional Black Cab, same distance, perhaps the traffic is a bit lighter, £30. The following night it’s Uber again, this time to Cove...
Travel, relationships, India and McLeod Ganj at Dharamsala, Australia, Burma, they all feature in Catherine Anderson’s The End of All Our Exploring, a wrenching memoir about her intense, but sadly truncated relationship with the writer and photographer Angus McDonald....
It won’t be published until 2018, but I’ve already put a lot of work into a forthcoming book for the National Library of Australia to be titled Australia’s Islands. There are an awful lot of them, more than 8000, more islands in fact than there are in the Caribbean. T...
I regularly comment on the wildlife that appears in my backyard (or my internal courtyard) and in 2015 I wrote about the Gippsland Water Dragon which had taken up residence. Again this year there has been no nesting activity in the courtyard, but there certainly has b...
It’s 100 years since the Russian Revolution ushered in Communism and the Soviet Union, assorted galleries and museum in London are celebrating the occasion. The Royal Academy on Piccadilly features Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 which runs until 17 April. It cov...
The Vanishing Stepwells of India by Victoria Lautman (with a foreword by Divay Gupta) is a stunning large format coffee table book about stepwells. Global Heritage Fund, the archaeology organization I work with, had stepwell projects a few years ago and their descript...
I like bicycles, I’m not a collector, but I do have a few of them. They get used whether it’s just riding around Melbourne – here’s a comparison of my three bicycles in that city. Or riding further afield, like trying out my new London bicycle with a little London-Par...
Lake Eyre – A Journey through the Heart of the Continent – by Paul Lockyer is an ABC coffee table booking which sums up with interesting text and fantastic photos this weirdly wonderful Australian lake. It’s Australia’s largest lake and the fifth largest ‘terminal’ la...
Back on 1 December 2016 Yahya Jammeh, Gambia’s president ‘for a billion years,’ lost an election and surprised much of the world when he said he’d accept the result and walk. Shortly after, to nobody’s surprise, he didn’t depart at all, but finally on 21 January 2017 ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013