The Bridge Over The River Quap

There, that's better! I can see again. My new glasses came last week and they are exceptionally cool and funky, just like their owner....

Anyway, I thought I would regale you with some thoughts about bridges today. One particular bridge in fact. If you fly over Sarawak for more than a few seconds, one thing you will notice is that its broccoli-forested surface is shot through with hundreds of tea-brown rivers, winding their way crazily all over the State. One particular river is the River Quap, a stretch of which has a bridge that carries me to work and back every day.

I did some amazing maths concerning this bridge. With the aid of a perpetual calendar on the Internet, I estimated roughly how many times I have travelled across that bridge since I started working in my present university back in September 2002.

Assuming that we remove Sundays and holidays, and only count the working days, the figure comes to something like 1,332 days. Multiply that by 2 to account for the daily outward and return journeys and you get 2,664. That means that I have been over that bridge approximately 2,664 times since September 2002, when I started driving out that way to work regularly.

And for the money-minded ones among you, if you have ten Ringgit Malaysia for every trip, that comes to the princely sum of RM 26,640! Not bad, especially as I have certainly been across that bridge many more times than 2,664, in the two years before when I worked at a private college in town. So I would have a nice little sum if I could convert my daily trips across the river Quap into money.

But that won't happen, of course. Instead, I am left to ponder just how vital that bridge is to all of us who use it every day. If that bridge were to be blown up by terrorists, God forbid, Kuching would be completely cut off from its important agricultural hinterland around Kota Samarahan, and it would be extremely difficult to get from Kuching to the main universities, as well as the rest of the State and the Indonesian border, because the alternative routes are somewhat awkward.

But I found out last week that you don't need evil terrorists to make the Bridge over the River Quap inoperable. All you need is a couple of pieces of metal. Allow me to explain...

At the moment, the Bridge over the River Quap is undergoing a major upgrading programme which involves enormous cranes and gangs of workers and makeshift railways. In fact they are building a second bridge, right next to the current one, so that eventually, we assume, there can be two lane traffic going both ways across the river.

The resulting increase in the number of heavy lorries has apparently caused the metal joints between the existing bridge decks to sink. This is not dangerous at all, but it does mean that the joins between the bridge decks need to be covered over, because cars have to slow down so that they can pass over the joints without breaking their suspension.

And the resulting traffic jams are absolutely Biblical!

The other day, some bright spark decided to place two metal plates over the worst of the joins, presumably with the aim of allowing cars to drive over safely. However, these plates had been placed one on top of the other in such a way that the 'bump' was too high for cars to drive over at a normal speed. And of course that meant that everyone was going at a snail's pace.

It makes me wonder why they didn't just simply fill the gaping joins with concrete and tarmac, or maybe that would be too simple. They have to complicate things with huge plates of metal which cause busy and tired people to drive like sleepy tortoises, when they should have been able to move like hares.

Maybe this is a carefully-designed plot to force us to slow down and appreciate the wonders of nature, such as the lovely river and its rapidly disappearing mangrove banks, or the misty and mystical presence of Mount Santubbong and Mount Serapi, or even the heartbreaking splendour of the Kuching Sunset.

I mean, where else can you sit and savour the endearing social realism of men fishing from the bridge, or the gangs of brown-skinned workers toiling like ants over the deck sections of the slowly-evolving new bridge on the other side?

It might even be an attempt by the Sarawak Association of Plane-Spotters (SAPS) to get us to marvel at the might of human technological prowess as the planes come roaring overhead on their way into Kuching International Airport.

Or it might just be a traffic jam caused by someone placing two metal plates on top of one another in a surreal fashion!

God only knows!!!