Climbing the Sydney Bridge

 It's one of our travel rules to always climb to the top.   

Today we are climbing to the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

 It's not for the faint of heart......

 
Our philosophy is, you can see things when you travel, or do things when you travel, or, the ultimate I think, is to experience things when you travel.  We try to have an experience everywhere we go.

Climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge 

was quite an experience, actually.  

First, there's about an hour-long prep session and safety lesson.  Keep in mind that this is an active, working bridge that we are climbing, with six lanes of traffic, something like 160,000 cars per day zipping back & forth underneath us, so safety for both climbers and drivers is paramount.  The first thing you always pack is your sense of adventure.  So here we go!

 This is where we're headed. To the very top.  440 feet in the air, above the traffic and, ultimately, above the harbour.

Can you see the teeny-tiny people up there on the top railing?  

No?

  

How 'bout now?   Yup, that's gonna' be us! 

Once our safety session is completed, they had us strip down to our underwear and don these very fetching matching jumpsuits.  Well, jump is not a word we want to use in the context of a bridge climb, so we'll call them fetching matching outfits instead.  This to prevent us taking anything up-top with us.  No cameras.  No chapstick.  No sunglasses allowed, either.  Nothing.  Eye-glass wearers must have them tethered.  No object of any kind that might be dropped onto / into the traffic below.  We even go through a metal detector just to be sure that nobody cheated.

(I shudder to think of the carnage that could be caused by a stray object falling from the sky onto a speeding car, which swerves, startled, into another vehicle...........and so forth, and so on.......)

Plus we are administered a  breathalyzer test, just in case somebody thought that liquid courage was what they needed to complete the challenge at hand.  And no, that's not allowed.

Since my camera did not make the journey, 

all the pictures up top are courtesy of the Bridge Climb folks, 

and I am grateful to have them.

As an additional safety measure, we are tethered by a chain around our waist to a metal cord which you can clearly see here;  this to prevent any potential "jumpers" from creating a messy issue on the road below. 

We have headsets on, so that our group leader can fill us in on the facts and history of the bridge (started in 1923);  how long it took to build (8 years) and the like.  

The climb is done in phases, we hike one section and then pause for a bit to enjoy the spectacular view, and then proceed again, all the way to the summit, where we are some 44 stories above the water.

 

It's breathtaking ~ exhilarating ~ liberating!!!  I loved it!!!

Even though I'm even a little reticent about heights....

There is a day-time, and night-time climb.  Mr. C chooses the twilight climb, as we get the double benefit of a day-time view, and we also get to watch the great city of Sydney light up the night sky.   

Yeah, he's romantic like that.  

It also means we get to wear the cool little headlamps  (seen here hanging around our necks) for the descent.  

I feel like we're in a James Bond movie.

Sydney is a fascinating city, one of the few places that gets our "We Would Return Here" badge.   It's zesty and active and interesting.  

Not the least of which, it's the only place in the world 

that you can climb to the top of the Sydney Bridge 

and look down on the Opera House.

 This whole experience has reconfirmed our belief that

  one should always climb to the top, 
where the view is always the best!