Ecuador's Bridges: Puente Rio Baba (6)

This photo shows one of the anchorages for Puente Rio Baba. Walter (the designer and builder) is standing with one foot on the suspension cable and Zoe (from Bridges to Prosperity) is sitting next to him.

A metal frame made from pipes is embedded in the concrete of the anchorage and a length of cable is wrapped around the metal frame and extends outside the concrete. Walter weaves this cable into the suspension cable (he showed me how to do it, but now I can't remember).

Walter took me deep into the jungle to see how he surveyed the riverbanks near a village to see if he could build a bridge at the site. We traveled up and down the river in a dugout canoe with campesinos using machetes who clear a path for us.

Everyone was very grateful for Walter's work. Sometimes farmers would cut down bunches of bananas and other fruit and throw them into the back of Walter's truck. Once, we spent several hours surveying, and then Walter had to tell the villagers that the river was too wide for one of his bridges.

Ecuador's Bridges: Puente Rio Baba (6) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.