Whipping through Pakistan's commercial capital of Karachi on the back of a motorbike is not for the faint of heart. But sometimes it's the only way to go.

The city is akin to a colossal bumper car pavilion. The broad roadways and narrow streets gush with trucks, cars, motorcycles and motorized rickshaws brawling to outrace each other. Tossing regulations and safety aside, drivers dodge into oncoming traffic, jet across crowded intersections and fly through red lights as if fleeing the clutches of pursuing beasts.

At some intersections, blue-capped, white-panted traffic police whirl their arms in furious attempts to bring the exhaust-spewing tide to heal. Elsewhere, officers stand on the teeming sidewalks, indolently watching the moving mess, knowing there is nothing they can do.

Drivers damn the police and lament the vehicular bedlam. But having vented their frustrations, they rev their engines and revert to the very same anarchic behavior they have just cursed.

Aijaz Shaikh, a reporter for an Urdu-language newspaper, has ably buzzed me around his hometown on his battered 50cc Honda since my arrival on Sunday to cover the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's assassination.

I drove a motorcycle in similar chaos when I lived in New Delhi during the 1980s. But I had forgotten just how hairy it could be. I clung white-knuckled to the rear grip of Aijaz's clattering motorbike, unable to get a firm purchase on the bent left-side footrest as we joined the rush of traffic.

But as I relaxed, reassured by Aijax's deft piloting, I came to realize the advantages.

When the four-wheelers become snared by the massive traffic jams for which Karachi is known, their two-wheel cousins slide right on through, threading the maze-like gaps between the snarled vehicles or scooting into the opposing lanes.

Aijaz's clattering steed has been a godsend. We have raced between interviews and avoided troubled neighborhoods, detouring down serpentine alleys of the trash-choked ghettoes in which most of the city's 17 million people live in grinding poverty.

And when gasoline shortages and street clashes drove taxis off the roads after Bhutto's death, Aijaz was there with his motorcycle.