One of the goals of our journey has been to overcome our fears.  We’re not referring to any specific fears necessarily, but heading blindly across the planet is an experiment in confronting our fear of the unknown (and the unknown is the source of almost all fear it turns out.)  Our family has grown much stronger in these first 118 days on the road and we look forward to getting tougher yet.  We tell the kids we want them to get so tough that “They eat cockroaches for breakfast, crap them out, then eat the crap for lunch, then, if they finish that, they can have ice cream.”  We’re still working on the breakfast part.

Part of our basic training in overcoming fear is embodied in simply walking across a busy intersection in Hanoi.  There are no lights at these intersections, no pauses in the traffic, you must simply walk out into traffic, trusting that they don’t want to hit you anymore than you want to get hit.  Our first attempt, as documented in the iPhone POV video below, had us walking across in a single tight line so no stragglers would get nailed by swerving motorbikes.  Listen carefully to the raw, unedited soundtrack.  This is what overcoming (or at least confronting) fear looks and sounds like.