Going Nowhere Fast

We were at the last toll in Malaysia before the customs, topping up our Touch And Go card, when Noi said, Oh, a jam. She said it so gently that the full import of her remark did not strike home until I saw said jam, and just how big it was. Fortunately it didn't stretch back as far as the toll - as it did on one particularly miserable occasion some years ago. Unfortunately it went on well past the 500 m sign and was typically chaotic.
 
Now I don't mind making slow progress to immigration as long as some progress is made. So the first twenty-five minutes weren't so bad. Yes, we were stationary much of the time, but we were definitely in motion in between pauses. But then came another twenty-five minutes of being essentially rooted to the spot, and that's when I lost patience. It's the illogicality of it all that does it. How on earth can you simply come grinding to halt when there's a least some motion on all sides? Our assumption is that some driver ahead of us in our part of the queue, insofar as a civilised word like 'queue' has any meaning here, lost their nerve at discovering there was no place left to go and instead of fighting for the non-existent place just gave up and waited for something to happen.
 
I honestly thought we might be there all night since there was no sign that anything in the situation was going to change any time soon. A large part of the anguish involved was the strange feeling of not knowing what the heck was going on, of course. And we still don't really know what took place. But we managed a sharp thrust to our left when some daylight opened up and got through to this Far Place a lot earlier than I was expecting at one dark point.
 
So the moral, I suppose, goes something like: There's still hope as long as you're moving. Earthy, but true.