The Bridge Held By Two Giant Hands

Take the cable car up into the hills west of the city and the world drops away below you. When you step out near the top, you find a strip of gold path curving through the mist. Holding it up are two giant grey hands, cracked and mossy, as if they reached out of the mountain to carry the bridge. People call it Cau Vang, the Golden Bridge.

The bridge is 150 metres long and sits about 1,400 metres above the sea, up at Ba Na Hills. On a clear day you can see the hills roll away toward the coast. On a normal day you walk straight into cloud, and the far end of the bridge simply disappears into white.

The hands look like old carved stone, but they are not. They are built from fibreglass over a wire mesh frame, then marked with fake cracks and moss to look ancient. The bridge itself is a steel frame painted gold, with a wooden floor under your feet. It only opened in June 2018, so it is younger than it looks by hundreds of years.

A team of Vietnamese architects designed it. The lead designer, Vu Viet Anh, said he wanted it to look like the giant hands of a god lifting a thread of gold out of the land. It was built for a plain reason too. It links the cable car station to the gardens, so people do not have to climb a steep slope. The photo it gives you was a bonus, and that bonus went around the world within days of the opening.

The mountain under it has its own story. Back in 1919, the French built a cool mountain escape up here to get away from the coastal heat, with villas, a wine cellar, and winding roads. Most of that is gone now, and the giant hands took its place. Go on a clear morning, take the first cable car before the crowd, and walk out until the mist swallows both ends. For a moment it feels like the hands are holding you too.