Pantsless Sydney Harbor Bridge Climb

We left for Sydney on Good Friday, with plans to explore the city and get to the bottom of the Melbourne - Sydney rivalry.

We arrived at our hotel a little after lunchtime, and after refueling, headed out to explore the city.  We were staying around Hyde Park, which is about 3km from the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

We wandered around Hyde Park, reminded BigBull that everyone still drives on the left-hand side of the road, visited Darling Harbor (where they were having a clown festival), toured around Sydney Harbor, and took in the sights.

ANZAC Memorial, Hyde Park

Hyde Park

Darling Harbor

Lucky to be alive

On Saturday morning, Jeff, BigBull and I had a booking to climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge, while Chris Ann explored the markets in The Rocks and walked the whole Harbor Bridge (and back!).

The Bridge Climb was a pretty cool experience - we got to see the best views of the city and learned about the building of the bridge.  The whole process was really well run, and after we did a breathalyzer (to ensure we were't going to fall off the bridge), we were given these fabulous climb suits.  Since it was forecast to be about 75 degrees, they recommended that we take our pants off so that we wouldn't get overheated on the climb...so we did  :)

The walk starts off in the bowels of the bridge, getting us to the actual bridge itself, then you climb up four ladders to find yourself standing on the top of the girders of the bridge.  We proceeded to climb to the middle of the bridge, take a bunch of pictures (the guide was the only one that was allowed to have cameras), cross over the center of the bridge and come down the other side.  All in all, it took us about 3 hours to get dressed up, climb, take pictures and come back down the other side.

The bridge took 8 years to complete and on the day that the bridge opened, there were only 5 cars that lived on the north side of the harbor - lord only knows how many are there now.  There are about 6 million rivets that hold the bridge together, only 4 bolts, and about 10,000 rivets that were dropped into the harbor below (since they threw them to each other, this doesn't seem like that big of a deal!).

To put the 8 years in perspective...they are currently repainting a portion of the bridge and it has taken them 8 years to paint about a quarter of the entire bridge (safety standards)...to build the entire thing in 8 years was quite a feat!

Sydney Harbor Bridge