Welcome to Mandalay, the motorbike city! They’re everywhere! Thousands of them! And the lanes drawn on the road (even the direction the traffic is supposed to go) mean *nothing* to them! And the speed limits… Oh. What speed limits?

I have never been anywhere where I have been more terrified to cross the street than in Mandalay.

It turns out that with sufficient ingenuity you can carry almost anything on a motorbike. (Later, in Phnom Penh, it wasn’t uncommon to see four, five, or even (rarely) six people astride a single motorbike.)

And here’s another good thing about motorbikes: They’re really easy to park in a small space.

Bicycles, it turns out, are easy to park, too.

Why the parking areas seem to be segregated by bike type, I can’t say. But they are.

Atop Mandalay Hill, where the tourists go for the view in all directions, and the natives go to practice English by speaking with the tourists, I met a young man who was studying engineering at the university. From the hilltop, he showed me the building that housed his university. It seemed pretty far away, and so I asked whether, after the demonstrations a few years ago the government had moved this university out of the downtown part of the city, as they had in Yangon. He said that yes, they had. And he now had to commute fifty minutes each way entirely across Mandalay on his motorbike every day to get between his home and the university, compared to fifteen minutes before. Just keeping the city safe from troublesome students while adding to the traffic problem, the need for gasoline (which is in short supply, and expensive), and global pollution.