Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb
Sunday afternoon (keep in mind its 19 hours later than Seattle here), my colleague Gray and I climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Not in that criminal daredevil way that many bridges and skyscrapers are climbed, but as part of an orderly group led by a guide.
It was a blast. We traversed gangplanks and stairs and various types of walkways, winding through the architecture of the bridge to its very top and then back down. The whole adventure takes about 2.5 hours, and as they say in promoting the experience, “you have a different relationship with the bridge when you’re done that when you started.” I’ve seen the Sydney Harbour Bridge in photos many times, but now it won’t be an abstract engineering marvel, but rather something I’ll look at closely and think “oh yeah, I walked right up that part there, then over there, then …”
There’s a company that runs these tours, and they have a 20-year lease that started in 1998. Some of the walkways we used are things they’ve built (to be removed in 2018), and at other times we were just walking on the bridge itself.
The bridge is massive. It’s the widest long-span bridge in the world and also the largest steel arch bridge in the world. The top of the bridge is a little over 400 feet above the water, and the roadway down below includes 8 lanes of traffic, a wide pedestrian walkway, and two train lines. They had great foresight, to have built such a huge structure back in 1932 when only a fraction of its capacity was needed.
The climb is just part of the experience. The preparations are interesting too — part mountaineering expedition, part military operation, part tacky tourist trap. You start with signing a waiver, of course, then you take a breathalyzer test — over .05 and you can’t go up. Having just disembarked from a 14-hour flight in business class with free drinks a few hours earlier, I was a bit tense about the test, as the photo below shows.
After signing away your life and proving you’re not drunk (Megan, notice I didn’t say “pissed” — that’s for you), it’s time to strip down to your underwear and don a one-piece jumpsuit, then pass through a metal detector to assure you’re not hiding anything under it. Then it’s time to put on the equipment: the climbing harness around your waist, the hat and handkerchief and water bottle, the radio the tour guide uses to communicate with the group, and the hi-tech military-style bone-vibrating headphones that “work equally well underwater, so if you fall off the bridge we can continue talking to you.” The Aussie sense of humor is a big part of the experience too. 
The climb itself was full of great views, and really not scary at all. You’re strapped to a steel cable the whole way, and also between railing at all times. I guess you could fall 20 feet or so down the stairs in a couple of places (assuming your cable harness didn’t break the fall), but to actually fall off the bridge you’d have to really work at it.
And some have. At the top, I asked Matt our tour guide “what’s the dumbest thing anybody has ever done on these climbs?” He then told the story of two separate incidents where guys had taken the tour intending to commit suicide at the top, but the tour guides managed to restrain them after they unbuckled their equipment and tried to jump. As Matt said, “that really kills the upbeat tone of the experience for others in the group.”
Then, a few minutes later, Matt remembered another dumb thing somebody had done. A guy and his girlfriend had done the climb with a bunch of relatives, from both his family and hers. At the top of the bridge, the guy dropped to his knees and proposed. Her answer was an icy “we’ve talked about this before,” and then the group all went back down in awkward silence. Having said that, Matt did say there have also been many successful proposals on the bridge.
Mom, you should do this climb. Seriously, I’ve been up many monuments with you, and this climb isn’t nearly as difficult or dangerous as some of the stuff you do. And with your new knees, it would be a piece of cake. Pick a date, and Megan and I will accompany you.
Anyway, that’s the Sydney Harbour Bridge climb. One of the final things Matt told us was that the average person burns enough calories on the climb to make up for three drinks, so when you stop at the nearby pubs to rehydrate you don’t have to start counting until the fourth one. We had three pints of Toohey’s Extra Cold lager (which has a little LED on the tap that says “-0.7F”), so I guess that means we didn’t have a drink at all. Should have gone back and tried the breathalyzer again, by golly.
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 12:23 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on February 18, 2007 at 2:31 pm Tom wrote:
You both wore the same thing — how embarrassing!
Very cool — I’ve seen travel shows that have this bridge climb on them. I’m not sure I could do it (don’t much like heights, really hate deep water), but the view obviously can’t be beat.
on February 18, 2007 at 2:37 pm Tom wrote:
Just saw the part about the proposal — my parents took a hot air balloon ride a few years ago, and the pilot was talking about someone who did that about twenty minutes into the flight. There were eight other people in the basket, and she said, “I don’t feel that way about you.” The flight still had about three hours left to go, and most of it was spent in uncomfortable silence. Erggh.