Myanmar Motorcycle Epic 19: The Worst Road I've Ever Been On.

I work really hard on a video, and after 3 days, it gets 40 views. In this Myanmar tour, after 19 videos, only a couple of these vids have received more than 100 views.  Does this bother me? Not so much. Would it be more satisfying if my travel vids got thousands of views? Yes. 

Here’s the thing. My vids will survive me. Fifty years from now, I’ll be dead, but in that same time, thousands, maybe millions of people will watch what I’ve

created. That gives me a certain sense of satisfaction and purpose in what I’m doing. As much as I might say that creating stuff is its own reward, when you’re doing it for free, knowing that people will see it, that’s something anyone doing this would appreciate.

Also lately, I’ve been questioning how I make videos.  I mean, my style has been pretty much the same for years now. If you follow what I make, after hundreds of these, you might think ‘oh, another Joko travel video.. they’re all pretty much the same’… Understood.

It’s something that’s bothered me too. All my creations are similar to what I’ve created before. Subject matter and location different; style the same. I’ve been uncomfortable with this reality for years, but yet I’ve not done much about it. I still make my vids in the same style.

Tonight, I came to realize something. Did Bob Dylan ever wonder if his new song was just another Bob Dylan song? Did Led Zeppelin concern themselves over whether their new creation was too Led Zeppelin sounding? Now, I am not putting myself on these great artists’ levels, suffice to say, at some point, you forego innovation for recognizing that you have a particular style. This is my style. This is a Joko video, As much as I’d like to do something totally different, there’s nothing wrong with doing things like I’ve always done them.

That missive was a premise to the next travel blog. 

After 240km leg the day before, I was ready for a nice, easy travel day. This I got on  my leisurely journey from Naypyitaw to Taungoo. So easy it was that it doesn’t even get its own video. It gets combined into the next day’s journey.

  When leaving Taungoo, I had my choice of routes to my next stop, Kyaikto. I could have continued down the Old Yangon-Mandalay Highway, but instead I decide to take the road less travelled, turning back to the east, hugging the hills as I headed south down the Sittang Valley. 

Oh, that was a mistake. Sometimes, there’s a reason why a road is travelled. It’s because that road is total crap and barely driveable!