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.
My recent southern England museum tour included one more interesting place, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum. Merton Russell-Cotes was a tourism pioneer in Bournemouth, one of the towns which pioneered ‘going to the seaside’ tourism in England. He bought...
▲ Flying out of London to Morocco a few weeks ago we passed just north of the Isle of Wight, with the whole island framed in my window. Earlier this year we sailed around the southern coast of the island and then up the Solent into Southampton on board the Queen Ma...
I managed to depart Boston just before Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of the USA. I was in Boston for the opening of the big new Hostelling International Boston Hostel and most of my brief stay in the city was tied up with that. . I did get to walk around th...
Last month Maureen and I had a short stay at a friend’s house in Marrakesh in Morocco. Our previous two visits to Marrakesh were in 2007 when we drove through on our way to Banjul in Gambia on the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge – nurse an old car down to West Africa and gi...
A quick trip London-Boston-London to speak at the new state-of-the art Boston Hostelling International place, 480 beds, many of them in private rooms, lots of communal space and facilities and neatly squeezed between Chinatown and the Theater District and a stone’s th...
Three years ago, on a visit to Galway in Ireland, I drove up the coast to the place where in 1919 pioneer aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown touched down on the first ever trans-Atlantic flight. Soon afterwards I had a look at their ungainly Vickers Vimy biplane in...
Before my recent trip up the Karakoram Highway through northern Pakistan to Kashgar in China I spent a day on a side trip to the Murree hill station and looking around Islamabad. On my last visit to Pakistan in early 2006 I went to the ancient Buddhist site at Taxila,...
Daniel Smith adds to the list of travel list books – Lonely Planet has certainly done a few of them – with 100 Places You Will Never Visit. In fact some of them you probably won’t want to visit – terrorist would prefer to avoid Guantánamo Bay, ditto for drug smugglers...
◄ Yes, it’s a Murree Beer, the national beer of Pakistan. In fact the only beer of Pakistan. Officially Pakistanis – good Muslims all (or almost all) – can’t touch alcohol. Which makes being the country’s only brewery a difficult business, you would think. In fact Mu...
▲ Our Karakoram Highway (KKH) trip from Islamabad in Pakistan to Kashgar in China certainly provided some great images, like this one of a very dangerous looking Pakistani petrol tanker. ◄ Pakistan’s often very modern petrol stations regularly advertised that t...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013