(This worker is climbing up the bamboo scaffold to the eighth floor. He is buckled up with a safety harness to the fall prevention gears. The scaffold is tied to the building at regular intervals)
Bamboo scaffolds may look like monkey bars of a huge magnitude. But as perilous as weather-beaten, bamboo scaffolds are not fun filled either in hot or cold weather. Up on a scaffold , the scorching heat of the sun or the chill blown from the north is sharply felt. It is, however, the danger which really makes bamboo scaffolds off-putting to those other than the daredevils.
All the bamboo sticks used for building a scaffold are not the same. There are new bamboo sticks and old. The tradition of the trade is to use the old sticks only unless a ritual to charm the new sticks is perform-ed. Call it super-stitious or not, new bamboo sticks have to be smoked by joss sticks for 24 hours before the luck charm turns potent. After that, the new bamboo sticks are believed to be accident-proof.
(The worker is moving the bamboo sticks one by one from a side road to the bustling Nathan Road)
Surely, to play safe, the luck charm has to be reinforced by other formations of a bamboo scaffold. These formations include suitable 
means of access such as gangway, stairs and ladder from the building or ground level to the scaffold, platform of a catch fan or a receptacle to be covered with galvanized zinc sheet for tapping falling objects. Steel brackets shall also be provided for supporting the standard of scaffold at about six floor intervals and horizontally at about every 3 metres. Mild steel bars or similar materials called putlogs are required to tie any structure to maintain the bamboo scaffold in its position on every floor. Then there is the working platform restricted at a minimum of 400mm 
wide to be closely boarded by planks. The edges of working platform shall be protected by not less than 2 horizontal bamboo members of the scaffold at intervals between 750mm to 900mm and suitable toe-boards with not less than 200mm high.
Bamboo scaffolding is a job perilous, weatherworn and much more specialized than what meets the eye.
(Watching them climbing down the scaffold through the screen on my GX200, I was reminded of kids coming down from the monkey bars)
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