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Stonecutters Bridge

The amazing Stonecutters Bridge is named after the Stonecutters Island, which is no longer and island but part of Kowloon.  The bridge takes traffic to Tsing Yi from where it can go onwards to Lantau and the airport.

It is an amazing structure to look and and can be seen from a large part of Hong Kong and the islands.  Unless you are a bridge-spotter though you won't get much value from actually visiting it as it is cars only and they tend to race over.  I don't know of any public buses that run over the bridge but you could always hire a taxi to take you there and back if you just wanted to see the thing close up.

As you go onto the first part of the bridge, which is more of an elevated roadway, you are passing by the container terminal.  That is one of the largest and busiest sea freight terminals in the world and it is quite amazing to see the huge machines moving shipping containers back and forth and piling them up like giant lego.

Once you get to the main part of the bridge itself you'll see that it is a cable suspension from two huge towers.  The whole thing is so gigantic and subject to so much wind strain that I'm amazed it doesn't even vibrate.  Remember Hong Kong gets Typhoons, luckily not that often a big one, but still it means all structures like this need to be engineered to survive intense winds and rain.

The building of the bridge was so challenging that it featured on the Discovery Channel "Extreme Engineering" not once but twice, it also won the top award from the Institution of Structural Engineers, United Kingdom.

Impressive as it is the local tax payer like myself may wonder why exactly our money was spent on building something like this when there already are four bridges over this channel!

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