A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [67]
We’re close enough now that I can make out the features of the truck’s driver, the color of his shirt, the pack of 555 cigarettes on his dashboard. Just when our bumpers are about to meet, vaporizing all of us in an explosion of brake fluid, safety glass, blood, and bone, two cars to our right suddenly open up a space for us – and as if part of some hellish high-speed chorus line, we slip back into traffic. The water truck whips by with a terrific blast of wind, avoiding contact by less than a centimeter, and there’s that peculiar vacuum pressure-drop effect you feel when on a train that is suddenly passed by another hurtling in the opposite direction. Philippe just looks at me, shaking his head, says, ‘Are we still alive? . . . I . . . I was sure that truck went right through us.’ He’s not joking.
Every few moments, we do the same thing again, pulling out to pass – often pulling out to pass a vehicle that is already passing – taking up the whole highway, three-deep, screaming straight into cars and trucks doing the exact same thing in the other direction, horns blaring and honking, a sea of farmers and grandmas and children on rickety bicycles on both sides, the occasional added hazard of oxcart or water buffalo protruding dangerously into the road.
Again.
And again. This time, it looks like an army truck, olive drab, the back loaded with standing soldiers in fatigues. They’re coming right at us, not slowing down at all. Our driver doesn’t seem concerned. He’s having a nice conversation with an equally oblivious Linh, hardly, it seems, paying attention to what must certainly this time be our imminent doom. He honks the horn. He keeps honking. He leans right on that thing like it’s a magic wand that will somehow alter the laws of physics. His foot is still on the gas, the motor racing. I see Philippe’s knuckles getting white, then whiter on the armrest of his seat, see Chris the shooter’s eyes grow huge in the rearview mirror. There’s a collective holding of breath among the Western contingent as we all brace for impact, think fleetingly of loved ones, prepare ourselves to be thrown through the windshield . . . Again, somehow, we’re back in traffic, a momentary blast of air as the two vehicles nearly kiss paint. Then we’re right back straddling that center line again, honking wildly at a slow-moving car in front of us, tailgating at 120 kliks per hour.
Whatever magic safety zone our driver thinks envelops our car, protecting us from harm, we’re beginning to think he must be right. There’s no other explanation for our continued survival. Again and again and again, we just miss colliding, so frequently and regularly that, after an hour on the road, we actually begin to believe it, even count on the idea that we are invincible – that some Vietnamese juju does indeed prevent us from slamming head-on into another vehicle. We run straight at the most unroadworthy twenty-year-old Soviet-made contraptions on four wheels, gas pedal flat on the floor each time, enduring that queer Doppler effect as they whip by, the horns going WHOOoooANNnngggg as the shock wave blows us sideways toward a family of four on a wobbly bicycle. On more than one occasion, we come so close to rolling right over a pedestrian or an overloaded bicycle that I’m sure we touched them. I think all of us, long ago, would have screamed at our driver to slow down, maybe even attempted to wrestle the wheel away from him (he’s clearly a madman intent on destroying us all), but there isn’t a single second when we’re not paralyzed with fear, bracing for impact, or at least certain that if we were to speak, or distract him for even a split second, it would surely cause our instantaneous deaths.
Eventually, nerves shattered, blind faith takes over and we either try our best to ignore what’s going on outside the thin layer of metal and glass around us or we simply pray, nearly hysterical with fear and nervous exhaustion.
The city of Can Tho is a low-rise river town