There are moments of awe while travelling across the brand new Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, but finding the on ramp isn’t easy

Kenny Li is waiting patiently at a coach terminus in Kowloon on a misty and cold Hong Kong morning.

He is planning to have lunch in the Chinese city of Zhuhai, which on a normal day would take him about four hours to reach by road. But today the journey will take just over 30 minutes, because today is not a normal day.

Kenny is one of scores of passengers – including your correspondent – who are queuing for a seat on one of the first cross-border coaches to travel over the newly-opened Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge.

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The $20bn, 55km bridge and 6.7km undersea tunnel link Hong Kong’s Lantau island to Zhuhai on the southern coast of Guangdong province and the gambling hub of Macau, a popular tourist spot for Chinese visitors. The mega-structure is supported by three cable-stayed bridges and designed to withstand typhoon-force winds of up to 340km an hour.

It took almost eight years to build and, according to ambitious plans hatched in Beijing, will help form a high-tech and economic region, namely Greater Bay Area, to rival New York, San Francisco and Tokyo bay areas.

But those lofty aims feel fairly irrelevant to the band of eager passengers who have assembled at the Kowloon coach terminus on Wednesday morning. This group wants something different from the HZMB, as it has become known. For just HK$120 (£11) for a single trip ticket, we can be part of history.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Expectant passengers await boarding Photograph: Sherry Lee/The Guardian

Private cars can only travel on the bridge with a special permit, which is not easy and costly to obtain. So, taking the cross-border coach is the quickest and easiest way to become one of the first members of the public to travel on the bridge.

“I was the first person to get the ticket three days ago,” says Li, as he waits patiently for our white and green Chinalink coach to arrive.

Other passengers are similarly excited. YW Cheung and his wife bought the tickets on Sunday as soon as he heard about the news about coach companies running the bridge service.

“I want to take the first coach to cross the bridge,” he said. “We will meet friends in Zhuhai and eat out with them, and then we will go to Macau.”

But before we can take our place in the annals of human transportation, we have to find our way on to the bridge. Once everyone is boarded we leave the coach station at 8.45am. By 9.30am we are a bit lost.

Our driver, who is also on his first trip across the structure, is having trouble finding the right lane to take onto the bridge at Hong Kong port. The crossing is so new that road signs haven’t quite caught up. Anxiety among the passengers rises slightly. Will Li and Cheung’s lunch plans fall apart?

In the end, a red-faced coach company representative has to flag down some passing police officers and ask them to escort us onto the right ramp. “The announcement on the opening of the bridge was sudden, we barely had enough time to familiarise ourselves with the new roads,” he explains.

After a quick check by border control our coach finally makes its way onto the bridge. From here it is much smoother sailing. At first, the sea crossing feels like an ordinary drive on a three-lane highway, except instead of being surrounded by rolling countryside, we are flanked by a vast expanse of water. The sea is flat with no waves and the sky is foggy. The road itself is largely empty with the occasional port-to-port shuttle bus travelling in the opposite direction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Passengers onboard one of the first cross-border coaches to travel over the HKZMB Photograph: Sherry Lee/The Guardian

Soon the road slopes down to an artificial island where we enter a 44-metre deep underwater tunnel. After five minutes under the ground, we are back in the open air.

World's longest sea bridge to open ... but only to drivers with a special permit Read more

At this moment the scale of the project really hits. A ship that seems toy-sized is plying the sea below us. At times, you can see the whole bridge, hanging high above the water. The sea seems endless.

The feeling of awe doesn’t last long. Minutes later our trip ends abruptly. We arrive in China. The crossing had taken approximately half an hour. The lunch dates are saved. There are broad smiles all round. As we enter the Zhuhai checkpoint, a sign reads “No photos”. This is China after all.

The sea crossing has been controversial throughout its seven-year construction period. Budget overruns (from HK$7.76bn to HK$120bn – or $990m to $15.3bn), worker deaths and construction delays have dogged the project.

In Hong Kong there were fears that the bridge served – above all – a political purpose to bring the territory closer to its motherland at a time when politically sensitive locals were panicking over anything related to integration with China. Officials, however, claimed the new link between Hong Kong, China and Macau would boost flows of people, logistics, trade and money.

On the return journey to Hong Kong, mainlander Yin Qingyun is taking the coach to Hong Kong. The retired civil servant from Yunnan had made the trip to Zhuhai to witness the bridge’s opening. She said that she felt very emotional that Hong Kong, China and Macau could finally unite “like the same family”.

Not everyone is happy though. After the trip, Cheung is among those who is not overly impressed. “The trip is OK,” he says. “I was not too overwhelmed by the bridge, it is kind of ordinary.”