13/11/2025
Building bridges.
Basketball took me places, but this past month, I embarked on a 3-week journey across China that has opened doors to parts of the country and communities I didn’t know existed. The journey started with a bullet train ride from Shanghai (East) to Guiyang (West) to join our contact from the French tourism office of Guizhou Province, explore a 1-kilometer-long karst cave called Tianhe, and, unexpectedly, meet a local TV crew for an interview at an indoor basketball facility called Heaven Park.
But the real exploration began the day after, as we drove four hours across hundreds of hills and mountains, riding above the valleys on massive bridges or through countless tunnels while witnessing the luxuriant, vast landscapes. Every kilometer was a lesson in infrastructure, and through our questioning, we learned that Guizhou is home to 30,000 bridges, and that half of the world’s highest bridges are there! These massive buildings become catalysts for development, while they facilitate connections between cities and provinces, they also become tourist attractions. And we did exactly that as we reached the freshly built Huajiang Canyon Bridge —the world’s highest suspension bridge, which reaches 625 meters! Twice the Eiffel Tower. Thousands of people were already queuing to go through the bridge’s underpass, step on the glass walkway, or defy gravity with bungee jumping. As I reflect on it, beginning this journey by traversing such a monumental edifice helped me understand the importance of building bridges to connect people, whether through a concrete structure spanning mountains or something as simple as a basketball.
