GETTING HIGH IN CHINA: Don't look down

To be honest, I didn't know it at the time, all I knew was I was incredibly high.

It was at the borders of Guizhou and Yunnan provinces in the western China and on the bridge spanned the Beipan River valley below.

Way, way below. More than 550 metres below in fact, that's higher than the Empire State Building.

Beipanjiang – sometimes called Duge Bridge – is the highest bridge in the world and is part of the Shanghai-Kunming motorway. The bus I was on stopped on the other side to let us get out and have a look across and down.

Way, way down.

The officials were very proud of it.

As they should be, it is a remarkable feat of engineering – and this suspension bridge nearly a mile long had been open less than three years.

Aside from the sheer height above the valleys and river below, what I remember most was how few vehicles there had been on this important highway.

The philosophy seemed to be, built it and they will come. And on some lengthy bus journeys between cities and stops there were many examples of villages and small towns simply being moved out of the way, the population relocated and the motorway just pushing through the landscape.

Mountains were moved and valleys like that over the Beipan River were bridged.

We were closer to Lhasa in Tibet than Beijing or Shanghai.

But as I say, I didn't know at the time I was standing on the highest bridge in the world. That knowledge came one day when watching the television series Extreme Engineering and I thought, “Wow, I've been there”.

Oddly enough, the bridge wasn't the most memorable thing on that journey around those provinces.

Some day I'll write about the pornographic stones in a museum which had Chinese women giggling and covering their faces, and old Chinese men peering at them with an almost clinical curiosity.

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These entries are of little consequence to anyone other than me Graham Reid, the author of this site, and maybe my family, researchers and those with too much time on their hands.

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