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International locations: Roads and Bridges
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Alfred Hitchcock knew a thing or two about bridges. He turned the Forth Bridge in Scotland into an international icon by featuring it in The Thirty Nine Steps, and helped do the same for San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, featured in Vertigo. Admittedly it’s harder to do the same thing for roads – tarmac and dust having only limited glamour – but any scene in which characters go on a road journey is bound to be enhanced by beautiful roads and tracks, wherever your location might be.
Europe
France has always been a popular destination for car advertisers like Peugeot and Renault. The country has every kind of terrain and every kind of road - from the winding, high-hedged country lanes of the ‘bocage’ in Normandy to the motorways of the French Riviera, featured in Ronin and Spy Bound. The Czech Republic has winding side roads as well as large highways, whilst Poland’s most picturesque roads are situated in Podhale, Mazovia and Lower Silesia. Hungary’s scenic side roads, running alongside pretty rivers like the Tisva, are very beautiful. It’s even worth heading into the Pilis and Bakony ranges, where, with a permit, forestry commissions will let you film on the winding forest tracks. A dustier alternative lies in the hilly terrain around Almeria, where narrow roads cling to the mountainside.
Italian roads are very straight, or very curvy, or somewhere in-between. The Roman Via Appia marches onwards, disregarding obstacles in a dead straight line; whereas above Ceresole Reale near Turin, the road winds its way tortuously up towards the Alps. It was here that Michael Caine got his great idea at the end of The Italian Job. The Amalfi coastal road winds around cliffs above stunningly blue sea, passing in and out of tunnels carved into the rock.
Off the Saharan Coast of Africa, the Canary Islands’ road network is well developed in some places – and not so well developed in others. Tenerife alone has two (count them) motorways, with bridges spanning steep ravines, whilst along the spine of Tenerife the TF-24 road offers many excellent views down to the coast far below. Roads in Tenerife have recently featured in advertising campaigns for Hyundai, Porsche, BMW and Mercedes Benz.
When people think of historic, beautiful European bridges, Italy’s Venice can never be far away. As well as the internationally famous Bridge of Sighs and the Rialto Bridge, hundreds of other examples, stretching through the city’s long history, are available. Down in Emilia Romagna is the remarkable Bobbio Bridge, which undulates over the Trebbia. Known as the Ponte Gobbo, ‘Hunchback Bridge’, it dates back to Roman times and is absolutely magnificent. It contrasts with the grandly gothic Charles Bridge in Prague, seen at the beginning of the first Mission: Impossible feature. This can be effectively combined with great sunset views of Prague Castle in the distance.
Hamburg in Germany has the most bridges in Europe. Almost 2500 bridges and viaducts cross the Alster and the Elbe - five times as many as in Venice. Almost every fourth bridge is more than 100 years old. The highest of all is the Köhlbrandbrücke, connecting the Waltershof container terminal with the Free Port. The curved cable bridge, visible from far away, has 88 steel cables and rests on 130-metre high columns. The bridge across the south side of the Elbe is 54 metres high and has four lanes. At low tide even huge container ships can pass through.
Other big bridges include the 1998 Vasco de Gama Bridge, so large that the curvature of the earth had to be taken into account during its construction, and the 16-kilometre Öresund Bridge, linking Denmark and Sweden for the first time since the last ice age 7,000 years ago.
Finally, an extremely nerdy suggestion for anyone making a film involving Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridges – or wormholes, as they’re more commonly known. Science fiction geeks are sure to appreciate the irony of a relativity professor pondering the gaps between universes as he crosses the Vltava in South Bohemia on the delightfully pretty, and appropriately named, Podolsky Bridge.
Africa
The Kasr-el-Nil Bridge in Cairo is a strange mix of cultures. Its european-influenced architecture, with stone lions guarding each end, was part of Khedive Ismail’s vision of Cairo as ‘Paris on the Nile’. Older colonial influences can be found on the Victoria Falls Bridge, commissioned by Cecil John Rhodes in 1900, who wanted the “spray of the falls on the train carriages”. The bridge is a real feat of engineering, linking Zimbabwe and Zambia across the Zambezi, today the site of the 111 metre Shearwater bungee jump.
If your body can cope with that, the bridge over Blaukrans River in the Western Cape region of South Africa is a bigger challenge: at 216 metres it’s one of the world’s highest drops. One of South Africa’s most photographed bridges is the Kaaimans River Bridge, located in Africa’s scenic Garden Route between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. The steam railway train, which crosses the bridge on its way between George and Knysa, is called the Outeniqua Tjoe Choo!
South Africa has an awful lot of road. Cape Town alone, for example, has more motorway than any other city in the UK.
Asia/Middle East
India’s busiest and longest single span bridge crosses the Hooghly River, linking Howrah to Kolkata, where you’re as likely to see cattle crossing as pedestrians. Before 1965, when it was renamed Rabindra Setu after the first Indian novel laureate, it was called Howrah Bridge and was the setting for a film of the same name made in 1958.
Further east, over in Burma, the real bridge on the river Kwai is a major tourist attraction - but there are plenty of tropical alternatives if a remake is on the cards. The original movie used Sri Lanka as its double for the Bangkok-Rangoon railway near Kanchanaburi.
Dubai’s Maktoum Bridge, a four-lane hydraulic structure, is both modern and innovative. Further up Dubai Creek is the Garhoud Bridge – although, to relieve bottlenecks, it is due to be demolished to make way for a new 14-lane monster-bridge.
The Americas
What could be more central to the American experience than the road trip? From Jack Kerouac onwards, America’s roads, striking out westwards into the vastnesses of the continent, have captured the country’s imagination. It’s easy to hitch a ride on the cultural bandwagon - and there are plenty of places across North America to do it.
Some of the most beautiful mountain passes are located in Montana. The romantically named Going to the Sun and Beartooth roads cut right through the centre of Glacier National Park, climbing to an elevation of almost 4,000 metres. Unsurprisingly, they’re only accessible in the summer and autumn. Then there’s the snaking mountain road on Mount Tamalpais in California’s Marin County, and the looming menace of Monitor Pass in Eastern Sierra (also California), to keep timid filmmakers awake at nights. Flatter alternatives, crossing the deserted central plains, include the “loneliest road in America”, Highway 50 in Nevada.
Another extreme can be found in the northern territories and provinces of Canada, where highways of ice cross lakes, rivers and bays. Nunavut and Greenland have plenty of these vital infrastructure links. An important tip though: don’t go in summer!
America has a rich selection of bridges, from the narrow Deception Pass Bridge in Washington State linking Whidbey and Fidalogo Islands’ craggy, conifer-covered cliffs, to the concrete arch of Oregon’s Depoe Bay Bridge. The landmark art deco Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was used in the original Superman film. Less well known is London Bridge, shipped across from the UK in the 1960s and now on Lake Havasu in Arizona. For inflatable bridges, travel to Canada’s Lake Okanagan, where the Kelowna Floating Bridge (opened in 1953) traverses one mile of water.
Another unusual bridge can be found on Antigua - the Devil’s Bridge is a natural arch carved out of the soft rock. But a warning to those with too much expensive camera equipment and not enough head for heights: the natural blowhole spurts out seawater regularly, and can knock people off the top.
Mexico’s roads and bridges in Dzilam, Yucatan, have been used to simulate Cuba. Brazil’s Trans-Amazonian Highway runs from Recife in the east to the Peruvian Andes and, as well as being an excellent jungle road itself, offers access to countless smaller tracks and roads of varying sophistication. Argentina has thousands of kilometres of routes and highways, running into all kinds of climates and landscapes. When location scouting, it’s possible to find everything from a twelve-lane highway to lonely dirt roads lost in the immensity of Patagonia.
Australasia
The great outback roads that traverse Australia’s hot and dusty ‘red centre’ have more perils than billowing dust, deadly wildlife and unpredictable streams which choose to cross the road wherever they like. There’s the much more pervasive danger of utter boredom, for Australian roads are dull, dull, dull. Train drivers crossing the desert have to have a special system of bells to help keep them awake, so monotonous is the featureless landscape. The Great Central Road and the Stuart Highway are just the same – vast sandy dirt tracks which weave through the desert scrubland, seeing only a handful of vehicles pass each day (only 10,000 vehicles a year).
Along the coast the transport infrastructure is better developed. A network of highways links all the major cities. The most beautiful and well known is the Pacific Highway, travelling between Brisbane and Sydney, with the ocean as a constant companion.
Australia’s most famous bridge is undoubtedly the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Others include the Gateway Bridge in Brisbane, a concrete cantilever construction that rises out of the city skyline. Alternatively, there’s the William Jolly Bridge, as seen in Inspector Gadget 2.
New Zealand has a claim to the most pointless bridge in the world – the famous “bridge to nowhere” across the Whanhanui River on the North Island. This was built in 1936 to provide access for a settlement which was never built. Natural growth has quickly covered the bridge’s approaches, but whether by foot, boat or air, the trip is definitely worth it. The relatively unused bridge stands as a reminder of a previous existence in an almost tropical setting, remarkable for its tranquil beauty.
New Zealand’s narrow lesser roads are riddled with obstacles such as streams and gullies, not to mention cattle and sheep, which add a quirky charm but could prove hazardous! New Zealand’s most impressive road traverses along the west coast of South Island, connecting a sequence of amazing places - including the Franz Josef glacier and the appropriatly named Remarkables range of mountains.
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