The World’s Longest Bridge

Written and photographed by Saul Latham

We’re traveling on a man-made island, along a new road fenced off from huge parcels of barren, muddy, puddle-strewn land – it seems lifeless. On the horizon behind, the old and new, battered and gleaming, are juxtaposed in the apartments, casinos, and business towers of Macau. Their lights are beginning to twinkle in the fading light of a dreary, wet day.

On the bus, Cantonese and Portuguese announcements are made over the loudspeaker, as two girls opposite me have their eyes closed, mouths wide open, and heads rolling to the sway of the bus. The bus pulls up. The sleeping girls instantly wake up, and the bus is vacated by all passengers. We’ve arrived at Macau Port. From here, we plan to travel across the recently opened Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge – the world’s longest bridge.

This was to be our exit from Macau, a place that made quite an impression on me in the handful of hours we spent there. The streets there are graced with seahorses, starfish, and other patterns made with pebbles and tiles. In the rain, this kept us as weary of slipping as we were of dodging the multitudes of umbrellas. Chinese New Year decorations adorned the old-world European buildings with a sophisticated unity and precise aesthetic. The place seemed a little more wild than Hong Kong; it showed contrast, vibrancy, and tang.

At Macau Port, we enter a huge box-of-a-building. Inside, it’s like a gymnasium. The air doesn’t smell of anything. We walk over to the ticket counter and purchase three tickets (each about 60 HKD) from helpful and good-looking staff. “China Security” whistle sojourners through two security checkpoints, and then round the corner into a long corridor where large security cameras hang from the high ceiling in rows. Other than a large tour group, there are barely any other people around. At an intersection, a right turn takes us to a huge, 50-by-50-meter immigration space. Signs say “no photos” and “no waiting.” The place is clean, bright, and empty. There seems to be about 50 immigration isles and gates. Three of them are in use, the rest beam circled, red dashes in bright LED lights.

After immigration, there’s a couple of soft-drink dispensing machines in the corner of the room. A huge screen shows a promotional video of Macau Police as they help find a woman’s handbag and reunite a lost little girl with her family. There are rooms with one-way mirrors. I go to the soft drinks and choose an apple juice. We walk through more corridors and eventually step outside into a huge parking lot. Only a few buses are docked. Our tickets are scanned, and at 5:25 p.m., we’re departing aboard a brand-new double-decker Scalia Marco Polo.

It’s wet, dark, and now getting cold. The bus passes under green arrows and eases onto the bridge. Fifteen lanes or more, turn into three on each side. There are shipping boats on the horizon and fishing vessels much closer. Five minutes into the ride and we’re heading nowhere but straight ahead. A display at the front of the bus says “Welcome aboard rdHZM Bus – Speed is 52 kph.” The water beside the bridge is brown and choppy – perhaps shallow. Macau shrinks behind us. We check the GPS map and see a little blue dot wandering about in the South China Sea.

In total, this bridge spans 55 km, connecting the populations of the Pearl River Delta and shortcutting traveling times substantially in the process. On this occasion, the infrastructure seemed as empty as it was vast. Later, I was reminded that, over the Chinese New Year, billions of people travel in this region, and of course, many did and would via this new way. Still, I wondered about the level of use of this mega-structure and weather it could justify the loss of workers who had “passed to the other side” during construction or the legacy that it has left on the environment. And while there is magnificence in this bridge, in its mind-blowing engineering, in its steely testament of human ambition and will, there is also, in my mind, a protest, a wish to protect the “natural” otherness of our distorting world – a desire for us to see the oncoming train at the end of progress tunnel and perhaps pirouette into adaptive and sustainable thinking and living.

Fifteen minutes in, at 5:35, the browned water has turned to a regular sea-green, and out of it, appears another man-made island in the middle of nowhere. I can’t see any land on the horizon, only the bridge remerging in the hazy distance, like a sea dragon, and numerous wooden fishing vessels surrounding the chunk of moved earth. Our speed increases to 90 kph as we descend into a three-lane tunnel. A handful of vehicles pass us every minute.

At 5:50, we resurface onto another island, where young palm trees stand in well-manicured green grass. There’s a monument of some kind. Slowly, the road begins to bend and rises up onto the back of the Loch Ness monster. Now, we have a view of Hong Kong’s jungly hills. On the left is the airport, and to the right is a cable car. We’re still on the right side of the road and descend into another tunnel at 5:58.

As China cements its spot in this world of nations, we notice that we’re still living in the industrial age. Progress is still built with flame, wood, steel, and grit. Nothing says progress more than a giant highway, and few ideas have taken to the human brain like the bridge – but where are these industrial roads leading us to, and why do we need to be there? Will there be a time when all islandness is lost to the bridges we build? Perhaps, as Goethe says, we should “burn that bridge when we come to it.”

Forgive my wayward and mediocre philosophizing, but riding on a bus heading straight for 40 minutes, on a colorless day, comparing just the two tones of brown water and grey sky with the sugary fuel of my apple juice at hand and in mind, I find myself thinking in these ways, dressed in mass-produced clothing, jotting it down in my industrious smart-object – and it is fun. It is exciting.

We’ve reached the Hong Kong end of the bridge, where fantastic road systems are entangled like giant slinkies. The bus pulls up to the curb at 6:03, and we’ve arrived at the immigration building. I’m gently told to take my cap off as soon as I step in. Again, there are plenty of immigration lanes and buses, but only a few in use. I have still not seen or heard a “Westerner” at this point. We board a third bus. This one takes us off Lantau Island and over more impressive bridging to Hong Kong Island. On this course, one can see the enormity of the Hong Kong port, the huge cranes that dwarf hundreds of rows of shipping containers into stacks of Lego blocks. Is there life on earth? Yes.

The Author
Saul is a Tasmanian living in Gwangju. He doesn’t always like writing, but he feels it’s the right thing for him to do. Same for exercise, he thinks. Saul is looking to getting into writing and walking at the same time, p’haps there’s an app for that…