Of late, the malaysiakini Letters column has been inundated with letters either proclaiming America either as the Necessary Evil, the Great Devil or as the Land of Opportunity for Oppressed NEP migrants. I thought I should contribute one migrant's view on America, and it has nothing to do with politics.

There is something mysterious and magical about America's roads and highways. Back in the days when my dad would take me on those 12-hour road trips to Penang on the old trunk road, I often wondered what lay at the end of the road.

My childhood fascination with blacktop has come back to haunt me now that I'm living in America. Every now and then, I get the urge to go driving somewhere anywhere. Just curious what the end of the road would be like.

There were 150 miles (250km) of paved roads in the US in 1904 but today there are 35,000 miles (55,000 km) of shiny blacktop. So there's plenty of road to hit the rubber with, which makes my problem bad.

Quite a few famous American authors have written extensively about the road and the thrill of it all. Jack Kerouac pioneered the field in the 1950s by typing all the way across the continent without punctuation. Charles Kuralt and William Least-Heat Moon soul-searched on the byways and back roads in the 1970s. Bill Bryson managed to get himself into sitcomy-situations and folksy conversations all around Smalltown USA in the late 1980s.

Walk into a bookstore here, and you'll almost find a book for every highway in America. But what's never been done is for a foreigner to write about these roads, someone free from childhood vacation traumas and not burdened by cultural baggage.

So, what are these US roads like exactly? Well, for starters, they're dark mostly. Unlike our PLUS highway, 90 percent of the paved roads in the US have no street lights, because the country is just that big. Driving at night can be hazardous, especially in remote areas.

The food is cookie-cutter bland McDonalds morphs into Carls Junior which morphs into Denny's which ....you get the picture. But on the US freeways, you have a choice of having your eggs either sunny-side up or scrambled.

Speaking of which, the one thing that has always struck me is the homogeneity of the built-up landscape along the main freeways (interstates). By this I mean the malls along the highways, the exits, the roadside restaurants.

You could be in Wyoming, California, Indiana, Florida etc but everywhere looks almost the same. The same restaurants, hotels, gas stations it's as of only a few companies ran the whole country. And this is a big country.

Which begs the question what's the big deal about these things anyway?

As a foreigner, the roads have a different meaning to me. They represent the rest of America, the ones that Malaysians don't grow up watching on TV. It's not the America of liberal Hollywood, it's not the American of 9-11/NYC, not the America of B-52s, tanks and GIs.

Heck, it's not even the Main St/suburban America where every other sitcom seems to be based. Personally, I think it's more the America that Americans don't really want to tell foreigners about.

There are all sorts of oddball characters who live on and off the road. Truckers, hobos, wandering free spirits (not the dead version), retired pensioners in recreational vehicles, illegal immigrants on their way to a job.

These people are transients - they live off the road, but are quite different from those who are living just a few miles away from the interstate.

It is those people that live in the small towns connected by the big roads that fascinate me. When I'm driving through these towns, often the only Asian face I see in days is when I look into the rearview mirror.

If you lived on the coasts, it is easy to lose yourself in the big cultural melting pot where Latinos, whites, Asians and blacks all mingle. In fact, living in a place like San Francisco or New York, forgetting your skin color is easy because no one really cares.

Between the coasts, the picture is reversed. Small girls look at you and either wave or cry, grumpy grandmothers carry a suspicious look when you pull up to ask for directions, and waitresses often ask, 'So, where'd ya come from?'

Is this the real America? Not at all, but it is one part of it.

I don't know how authors like Bill Bryson manage to dig up so many gem conversations. Those that I have had are pretty generic, as you can imagine, most of the people who ask me have never heard of Malaysia. I read somewhere once that only 10 percent of Americans have passports, which is a staggeringly tiny number considering how rich the country is.

But nothing beats the view. Some of the most beautiful places in America that I have seen, I saw them on the road. Snow in August on top on a Wyoming mountain range, the full moon by the lonely Utah desert, covered bridges and miles and miles of farmlands on top of rolling hills in Iowa, mist rising from the Grand Canyon like some god-like figure ascending to heaven, and of course, there is the Mother Road 'Get your kicks on Route 66'.

These are the things in the US you can only really see if you get into a car and drive away from the coasts.

Here's my theory about why the road is so popular in the American imagination - it's the ultimate expression of individualism in an individualistic society. Just about anything you need to function in society is somewhat dependent on other people.

On the road, however, you have ultimate control of where you go, how fast you want to get there, which detours you want to take. The only thing you need to worry about is to avoid psychos tearing up and down the freeways. Real life is hardly that simple.

Being Malaysian, I have to mention this as well there are very, very few tolls! Imagine that 55,000 km of roads and only a small number will ask you to pay, and even then the average toll is something less than a dollar.

So there you have it the foreigner's experience of what is the quintessential American method of getting away. Some people come here to realise the American dream, others come here to flee and forget the past.

I guess I just came here to drive somewhere.