“The only way to see Hanoi is from the back of a scooter. To ride in a car would be madness—limiting your mobility to a crawl, preventing you from even venturing down half the narrow streets and alleys where the good stuff is to be found. To be separated from what’s around you by a pane of glass would be to miss – everything. Here, the joy of riding on the back of a scooter or motorbike is to be part of the throng, just one more tiny element in an organic thing, a constantly moving, ever-changing process rushing, mixing, swirling, and diverting through the city’s veins, arteries, and capillaries. Admittedly, it’s also slightly dangerous. Traffic lights, one-way signs, intersections and the like— the rough outlines of organized society— are more suggestions than regulations observed by anyone in actual practice. One has, though, the advantage of right of way. Here? The scooter and
motorbike are kings. The automobile may rule the thoroughfares of America, but in Hanoi it’s cumbersome and unwieldy, the last one to the party, a wooly mammoth of the road— to be waited on, begrudgingly accommodated— even pitied— like the fat man at a sack race.
—p.78 of Anthony Bourdain’s book Medium Raw
