July 16th, 2007

Today we knew we wanted to do the BridgeClimb. It is something that Max has been telling us about for two years, so it was a definite item on our agenda. But, given my dislike for cold – we decided to wait until afternoon, when things warmed up, to do the climb. This meant we had to find something else to do for the morning. We attempted to go to the Police and Law Enforcement Museum – but it is only open on weekends. Instead we strolled through the Botanical Gardens to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It is a very nicely done museum. It has collections of European and Australian artists from the 1700s to modern day, as well as select samples of Oriental art also from that time period. It’s also got a collection of Aboriginal art work (which we both agreed that we don’t know enough about to understand/appreciate particularly much). The temporary exhibit was the only thing that charged an entrance, and we decided we were pretty much art-museumed-out at that point, so passed on the walk-through of Islamic art. Perhaps if we find ourselves with a bunch of time on the return trip. We instead opted for a lovely lunch at the museum café, where we watched two parrots help themselves to the left-over cake on the table of two delighted women. Clearly these parrots figured out that they are cute enough that people will take their pictures rather than shoo them off.
We took a very leisurely stroll back around the water-front perimeter of the Botanical Gardens, which ends in the water-front perimeter of the Opera House. It was somewhat treacherous mid-day as there were probably hundreds of people jogging through the park, we think on their lunch break! On the way to the BridgeClimb, we also stopped in a wonderful little French Patisserie to get a pan au chocolat, just for old-times sake. Then we arrived at the BridgeClimb building. We signed up for a climb about half an hour after we arrived, which meant we sat around gazing at the wall of pictures of famous people who did the bridge climb – kinda neat.
The Climb itself was spectacular!! We started with a good deal of safety preparation – mostly to the effect of preventing things (and people) from falling. Pockets emptied into lockers with your bags and jackets, jumpsuits without pockets zipped up from the back, and all accessories such as hats and fleeces clipped on in several places. There was also a clip for people, attaching to our harness belts at one end, and with a wonderful piece of equipment that would run the cord along the trails for the length of the climb at the other end. We practiced moving around with the clip, got radios that didn’t have earpieces, and were on our way! (The headsets sat just in front of the ear and used vibrations against bone to transmit sound.)
The climb starts out with some “catwalks” over the base of the bridge as it begins to extend out, then up a bunch of ladders, and then out onto the top of the archway and up to the very peak. With spectacular views and interesting tid-bits the whole way, it’s well worth it. Some things we learned: The large concrete pillars at the base of the bridge do not support any weight, but were added because they didn’t think anyone would believe that the bridge would hold up otherwise; there are 6,000,000 rivets in the bridge – which was originally only held together with rivets, though there is some soldering now; the owner/inventor of the BridgeClimb had to fight the government for 9 years to finally get permission to set up his business; and the bridge overlooks a building that has been voted the worst eye-sore in the city, but cannot be taken down as it was build early enough in the 20th century to be considered a historic site. But what made this climb even more spectacular than it would have been anyway was that we managed to time it such that we were on our way down the bridge when the sun set! That meant we got to see the sun setting over the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney from on top of the bridge, which gave a spectacular view of the sun, the mountain silhouettes, and waterways winding to the west from the harbor. The whole thing was amazing! After the climb, we had a wonderful (somewhat surprisingly so) meal at a pub, and went home to pack up in preparation for leaving tomorrow.