One of the first nights of my trip, at a local bar in Bangkok, I was enjoying live music by a better-than-average Thai cover band when I was surprised and amused to hear them break into a rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver. I thought it was pretty random and absurd for an Asian cover band to be singing a song I always associated with other folksy classics of Americana we sang at summer camp, so I did what I normally do in absurd travel situations – I took out my camera and recorded a short video.
Little did I know, “Country Roads” is easily the most popular sing-along song in Asia. It was everywhere, from family restaurants on the edge of the Sumatran jungle, to pop-karaoke shows in Penang food courts, to dive resorts in remote Sulawesi. So I started recording every version I came across, and I realized that many of my other videos happened to be of the various forms of transportation I’d been taking down Asian “country roads” – I mean, when you ride in the back of a pickup truck through a swiftly moving river in rural Laos, are you not going to record it?
So, here is the result – Asian Country Roads. Enjoy.
Believe it or not, there are more transportation clips that didn’t make it into the video. Let me know if this calls for a sequel…
Tailor shop in Khao Lak, Thailand
You must be young, Danna (so am I
). That’s the power of the 70′s. In many ways, the world nations were more intimate culturally.