Showing posts with label Guinness Book of World Records. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guinness Book of World Records. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

GOOD TREMORS ON THE GLASS BRIDGE

      Our 6th day (in 2019) started with great excitement as we were going to walk across the highest and longest glass-bottom bridge in the Guinness Book of World Records.

 Designed by Israeli architect Haim Dotan, the sky bridge in the WuLingYuan Forest National Park opened in 2016. It closed 13 days after for upgrading! It was designed to hold 800 people at any one time, but saw crowds of 80,000 per day.        

   Exiting from the cable car, the glass bridge was indeed exceedingly impressive. A "WOW" moment of the cliff-hugging mountains and sky. The bridge is 1,411 feet (430 metres) strung between two mountain peaks. 




The skywalk hangs above the ZhangJia Jie grand canyon at 984 feet, 300 metres.    

 The walkway is just large slabs of  transparent 3-layered tempered glass panels. Thank God, we did not have any fashionista with high heels trying to "wobble" across that day! 
SLOW SOFT steps to test the glass panels first! We were given cloth shoes to wear over our sneakers.
 I saw no shenanigans on the bridge. You know the ones on youtube where people are dragged screaming and begging for their lives across the bridge. Closest to that was a family who gingerly clung to the rails and crossed on the tiled instead of glass panels.
But, most were doing amazing acrobatic acts on the centre panels, 


"pretend" sky diving, 
selfies
and welfies galore.
Our Malaysian group was not going to be "usurped" by the China nationals so we had 
our "menfie" 


and "womenfie." Yeah, Malaysia Boleh!

   Such gravity-defying mega structures however do not come without accidents. In early 2019, there was one death as a tourist flew off a glass slide after rains made the glass bridge extra slippery. Six others were also injured on the same glass bridge in Guangxi. 

This is the view after crossing the mega structure. Newton's third law of motion says "what goes up must come down." Actually this is a derived version for the layman. Issac Newton actually said, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." So, began our trek down from the sky starting with the "bullet" elevator ride.

These pictures were taken at ground zero when we finally reach descent after 2 1/2 hours of walking. We were those "ants" earlier in the morning. 
It was already almost mid-day. 
Final steps and onto the bus for a Korean lunch in China. 
"GEONBAE!" BOTTOMS UP!