Thirteen years ago I was taking photographs of the picturesque local traffic (cars, horses, bicycles, pedestrians and the occasional freight train) crossing the rickety Dom Pedro II bridge that links two towns over a river in north-east Brazil.

As you do.

The narrow dilapidated iron bridge was originally built in 1885 by British engineers to span the Nile. Some say when it arrived in Egypt it was too short so they shipped it to connect the twin towns of Sao Felix and Cahoeira in a tobacco-producing province of Bahia, in disgrace.

Others say the bridge is the only thing that links the two towns – which have long been friendly rivals.

Unfortunately, the driver of the rust bucket of a car I was aiming my camera at decided to pose and not concentrate on the hazards ahead. His left wheel promptly slid on a loose plank into one of the bridge’s many holes, almost taking the rest of the car with it into the Paraguacu river.

This was also the day that Brazil became the first country in the world to have fully electronic elections and a lot of people were standing around waving flags, cheering the driver onwards and (for them, hopefully) downwards.

Fortunately, others decided to help pull the car out of the hole, to safety.

So if you ever get the chance to visit the bridge of a cruise ship, try not to distract the man behind the wheel.

Especially if the ship is passing under one of the world’s greatest bridges, such as the planet’s widest long-span bridge, an immense, 3,770 feet long single-arch steel construction in Australia that is regarded by many as Sydney’s defining landmark.

And you wouldn’t want to be around if your ship collided with the Akashi-Kaikyo bridge (a.k.a. the Pearl Bridge) which joins Japan’s two largest islands over the 328 foot deep Seto inland sea.

This possibility is unlikely, for the Japanese bridge’s central span of nearly 1.2 miles allows substantial clearance for vessels in the Akashi Strait, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

But there are some bridges where such clearance is not as generous.

Maybe you were one of the lucky 2,638 passengers on board the Queen Mary 2 when it inched its way under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge one Sunday afternoon in February 2007. The event was described as one of the riskiest passages by a cruise ship in modern maritime history. The QM2′s navigational margin of error was less than 70 feet.

If you’d like to experience the bridge of a cruise ship from the comfort of your own home, many of them have webcams that you can check out at the click of a button.

And if you yell out, for a joke, “Iceberg dead ahead!”, nobody will hear you.

James Leavey

Posted in Cruising