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SCMP Reporter

IT is 122.8 kilometres long, took 36,000 people to build and has nearly enough rock to make a full-sized copy of Victoria Peak.

  And it is all yours for a toll of a mere 80 cents a kilometre.

  This was the deal outlined by tycoon Gordon Wu Ying-sheung yesterday as he took a fleet of buses full of 400 bankers, fund managers, friends and celebrities up his Guangzhou-Shenzhen superhighway, for what he described as a ''soft opening''.

  ''I feel great,'' said Mr Wu, managing director of Hopewell Holdings, just before the armada of air-conditioned vehicles started rolling.

  ''I don't think this is the last of my highways. It's just the first.''   Mr Wu runs his trips like he runs his building projects, at audacious speed with only the slightest hint of timetable slippage.

  First casualty of the tight timetable was stock exchange chairman Charles Lee Yeh-kwong with an unsuccessful visit to the toilet.

  Finding the toilet door locked at the Lok Ma Chau border post, Mr Lee had to trek back to the bus, with a full bladder, because there had been no time to find someone with a key.

  This was the pattern all day, with Mr Wu's assistants blowing whistles and generally moving the assembled guests around like tourists on a package tour covering 17 countries in eight days.

  The highway starts straight after the border, and follows the coast until Tai Ping, when it moves inland to connect with the Guangzhou ring-road which is being upgraded by a consortium involving New World Development.

  The highway was empty apart from the fleet, and all the way, a commentary was provided: ''On your left is the Futian tax reduction zone, on your . . . ''   When planned in the mid-1980s, much of the road would have passed through duck farms. Now, two-thirds of the route are urban, passing firetrap factories, hastily built housing developments and a gigantic neon-signed nightclub in the middle of nowhere called Club Metropolitan.

  As the buses rolled past, toll collectors stood to attention at every one of the 15 junctions, in their starched white shirts and peaked caps, ready for the all-important job of collecting cash to give back to the bankers.

  These bankers were sitting in two Citybus double-deckers inspecting what Mr Wu had done with the US$800 million they had lent him.

  The loans had been a brave move, because just as the documents were ready to be signed in June 1989 the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, and most foreign bankers fled.

  But the bankers kept their nerve, Guangdong got its road, and Mr Wu gave a special mention to the syndicating banks in his roll of thanks.

  The trip north went without incident, Mr Wu's assistants extolling the wonders of the marvel, such as the 23,000 km of steel reinforcing used in the concrete, and the fact that 45 km is raised on stilts, ''Wu's Wall'', a white wall along both sides of the highway's length.

  Although designed to stop peasants grazing their goats on the verges, one passenger who had heard the claims about the Great Wall of China wondered whether it also served the function as the only structure built by Hopewell Holdings visible from the moon - so far.

  The amount of cash that will be collected from the route has yet to be agreed by mainland authorities. Hopewell has asked for 80 cents a kilometre for Hong Kong cars, with 80 fen for mainland vehicles.

   Container trucks will pay six times this - and despite all the talk of the convenience of driving to Dongguan for a meeting, the reality is that the road is all about trucks carrying containers, which will be able to travel to Guangzhou and back with no overnight stop - at a probable cost of $1,200.

  Having started the journey on the highway at 10.40 am, the buses left it smoothly at the Guangzhou interchange at exactly 12.08 pm - straight into a traffic pile-up at the Guangzhou ring-road.

  The superhighway was shown to be the fastest, most convenient way to get between the traffic congestion in the New Territories to the even worse congestion in Guangzhou.

  Citybus had carefully checked the bridge clearances for their mammoth buses, which they intend using for a regular service.

  Unfortunately, the police sent the fleet down a different route into the city centre, and they had to come to a sharp stop just before a flyover.

  The reckoning was that they had about six inches to spare, and they had to inch along with anxious Citybus managers walking alongside gazing anxiously at the sliver of space between expensive bus and hard concrete.

   Hopewell hired the ballroom at the five-star China Hotel in Guangzhou and arranged speeches from Mr Wu and Guangzhou governor Zhu Senlin.

  Then the whistles were blown and everyone piled back into the bus, this time the destination being the Shajiao ''C'' power station, half-way down the highway.

  By this time bus fatigue was beginning to set in and it was heightened by the short trip from the highway interchange to the power station, through traffic-choked dusty roads which are at present the only way to go to Guangzhou.

   The group listened briefly to a man with a megaphone telling them that the chimneys were 240 metres high before the whistles went and everyone was once again herded back into the buses.

  Just 18 months ago, the station was merely a mountain of paper making up a US$1.5 billion, project-finance package. At the end of this month, it is expected that the first boiler will already be fired up and electricity generated in October.

  By the time the fleet discharged its occupants at the Hopewell Centre in Wan Chai there were thoughts for a T-shirt ''I survived the Hopewell Holdings Superhighway Tour 1994''.

  And, the consensus was clear: if Hopewell offers to build you a road, it will do a great job, but if it moves into the holiday business, stay clear.



Wu rides the superhighway