My tickets weren’t until 5:30pm or so but I needed to be there a bit early for a briefing. I was at the place by 5:10pm and went up to the waiting area – they had a video that described the entire process and I watched it a few times while waiting – seemed like they had all of the safety concerns covered. It took them about 10 years to get approval to setup the Harbour Bridge Climb – the government blocked it for quite some time. Even then they only have a 20 year lease on the area of the bridge that they are using. If the city doesn’t renew the lease then they have to remove every single addition they put on the bridge which I’d come to find out would be quite a large amount of work. They add a ton of stairs / steel cable / remove concrete to make this whole ordeal possible.
Eventually my group got called in and we started filling out the paperwork. It’s the same with all of these types of things – blah blah I might die blah blah can’t sue blah blah. After the paperwork everyone took a breathalyzer. I didn’t have to take a breathalyzer to skydive but to climb the bridge I did – interesting. After we all passed the 0.05 limit we were taken to the suit room. This is where we got to put on our full body suit and had to take everything out of pockets – there was a metal detector later that we’d have to walk through. Everyone was dressed and then we made it to the harness section where we put on a harness – I wasn’t so impressed with the security of the harness but it was kind of nice because it wasn’t as obtrusive as say a rock climbing harness. The harness / body suit was pretty elaborate though and had tons of clips for various things – mainly because they did the climb in all types of weather. There were clips for gloves / a hat / scarf / fleece / croakies / etc. They had everything covered. There was even a clip for the headset and radio that we wore to hear our guide. After being triple checked we made our way to the bridge. I couldn’t stop smiling. I was pretty excited as we took our first step out and we weren’t even on the bridge yet. We had to walk a little while before making our way to the incline.
Eventually we made our way to the real start of the bridge climb and I got even more excited. Along the way our guide was telling us tidbits about the bridge’s history and how it was constructed and the such. It was really interesting to hear about it. To be such a famous bridge it really didn’t hold any records – it was just a very large bridge to be in the heart of Sydney. The climb was really fun – we paused along the way to take a look around – what a view. We kept climbing and it wasn’t really that grueling – I expected the climb to be a bit harder but it was pretty gradual the whole way.
We made it to the apex after about an hour or so and it seemed like quite the accomplishment. We had in our crew 13 people. The 2 at the end were a couple and once we were at the top – the guy got on his knee and proposed. She said yes and everyone clapped. Our guide told us that there were about 3,000 proposals and 3 people said no – that must have been an awkward walk back down to the bottom. Our guide also said that there had even been a few weddings at the top – now that’s a cool idea.
At the top we took a few pictures – taken by our guide because we weren’t able to take anything up with us. Later I’d come to find out that for 4 of them it’d cost $55 – no thanks! There were 2 flags at the top and due to the weather and constant beating that they took they had to be replaced every 3 months at a cost of $2,000 per flag – one was the Australian flag and one was the New South Wales (one of the 6 Australian states) flag.
We made our way back to the bottom – stopping to learn more about how the bridge was built and the architectural design behind it. Overall it was about 3 or so hours from start to finish. It was well worth the money I think. I’ll definitely have to bring Lora back here at some point.
After it was over I went back to the hotel and stopped for some food on the way back – nothing special – just some fish and chips. Once I was back to the hotel I relaxed – it was a lot of walking for one weekend.
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