From Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle p. 125:
On Highway 1, a concrete divider keeps the chaos going in one direction from colliding head-on with the chaos going in the other direction. Though the road is wide enough for three lanes in each direction, there are no lane markings, no shoulders, not even oil tracks, just one big long river of asphalt boiling with Brownian motion. If there are laws concerning what types of vehicle or creature are allowed on the national highway, the traffic cops aren’t enforcing them, too busy extorting bribes—unofficial fines, they call them—from truck and bus drivers who prove more lucrative prey than single travelers. Besides the pedestrians who walk along the edge of the road and occasionally attempt mad sprints across the highway, the road teems with cattle-drawn carts, horse-drawn wagons, load ponies, wheelbarrows, herders with cattle, cyclos, bicyclists, and everything motorized. Dust cloaks everything. The air, a metallic blue fog, makes the road murky, twilight-like. With the tropical humidity, it doesn’t so much settle as it condenses on the skin like a poisonous mist. The engines roar, the animals bleat, the horns, the curses, and the screams boil into a fantastic cacophony. Set back from the road under the shade of a few scraggly trees, the spectator cafés dot the length of the highway on both sides, their sooty lawn chairs all facing the traffic.
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