Thanks for the posts. Glad to see I'm not the only one who'd have bailed on that one. This, BTW, is only my second immortal game so even more reluctance to take a bad start further!
Shimmler/Memoryjar - Went for a hill for production thinking to go for early infrastructure quicker and saw the hills and figured I'd be closer to gold earlier. In terms of being near a river, does being at the top I the river count for waterwheels, etc or do you need to be right next to it? (Missing the mountain is just a duh thing as I get observatory so rarely!).
Krc - You went further than me - I called time on it at turn 9 and restarted. Seeing turn 50 I don't think I'd have gone further.
As to joys of isolation, my previous game was an isolated France start so I was looking for a little more earlier war in this one! (I'm now enjoying a landlocked game and have reduced Ethiopia and Brazil to City state status which is more what I was after).