BridgeClimb Sydney

The iconic harbor bridge of Sydney Harbour has always looked so beautiful in pictures. Today when I landed in Sydney, I discovered that there was a ticket I could buy to go climb it.

It is illegal to climb the Harbor Bridge and so you always have to go with the company named BridgeClimb. For the privilege, you get to pay them 347 Australian dollars. It is a good thing that US dollar is pretty strong so the pain is not that much compared to my last visit. Last time, there was a near parity between the two currencies.

I was not prepared for the fanfare and the deliberation of the climb. I have biked across the Golden Gate bridge many many times and thought this would be doing the same thing except just walking up. However, the overall experience had many components and it took 3 1/2 hours start to finish.

At the start of the adventure, you get to see videos and instructions of what to expect. They give you a breathalyzer test to ensure you do not have more than 0.05 blood alcohol level. You are separated from all your belongings, including phones, cameras, keys watches, hats, etc. They affix a lanyard to your glasses. You are given long overalls like jumpsuits with their logo, which kind of look smart and professional.

Next you lower your self in a harness and methodically buckle yourself in. All your belongings go in a locker and then they make you go through an airport style metal detector to ensure you have nothing in your pockets. The idea is that as you climb the bridge, something could fall off hitting pedestrians hundreds of feet below.

In my prior trip to Australia, I went to the great barrier reef, and did a scuba time dive without knowing how to swim at all. I remember thinking that they did not give too much weightage to safety and security. I was very surprised with the level of attention given to safety in this bridge climb. There was a model set of stairs with the same steep slope we would encounter in the actual climb. We had to train for 10 minutes to get the hang of the proper posture, footing, and use of the tether on this model.

It is wintertime in Australia, and there is a festival named vivid that is going on with some decorations, sculptures, lighting, show events at night. I was excited to see the different monument, sculptures, skyline, and vistas from the 165 m tall summit of the bridge.

Pete, our guide for our group with 13 people was charming, friendly, and seemed to love his job. He took the time to learn everybody's names and surprisingly call everybody with their names. He was guiding the climb for past 20 years, and does two or three climbs a day, which consumes between 8 and 12 hours for him.

As we walked in a single file, holding on to the rail, tethered to a cable which would be our companion for the entire three hours along the whole route of the climb, Pete used the walkie-talkie and piped his profound knowledge of the area, and the history of the bridge directly in our ear with the radio headphones, each of us was fitted with.

Pete told us how the Dutch architect of the Sydney opera house designed it to be half the height on the harbor bridge so that both of them together would look amazing in the pictures. He told how budget overruns from a $7 million inflated the initial budget into 102 million and took much longer to finish. The Dutch architect was upset when the project was politicized, and he returned to Netherlands, and never saw his creation finished however, before his death, he learned the opera house was a wonder of the world, a monument similar the Taj Mahal.

The wealth of information Pete gathered over the years included small facts like the rivets on the bridge number 6 million, twice those in the Eiffel Tower and about 10,000 of those are in the Sydney harbor, falling when workers mishandled them.

He pointed out the aircraft carriers, the Anzac bridge, the Bondi beach, Pacific Ocean and the apartment building below, which was going to be replicated all on the goat island replacing existing apartments.

He said the best Sydney view is from this building on New Year's Eve, when people are watching the fireworks from it, because the view does not include the building itself. Pete Humor!

The climb is a little strenuous, it took over three hours for the back-and-forth. It was enjoyable, especially because of all the anecdotes we heard. At the end of the trip, the BridgeClimb team seemed to have a well oiled machinery to get all the equipment off of us. Each of us got a certificate showing we completed the climb and then they sold us the pictures that they took of each of us!