I had never set foot in Asia. The culture felt too foreign, the distance too great, the risk of getting it wrong too real. But I went anyway, first to northern Thailand, where I traded the beaches everyone else was going to for jungle roads and elephants, then to China during Chinese New Year, where I discovered what it means to be truly lost in a crowd…This is the first episode of a several-part series about three months backpacking across Asia, and the six that followed in Japan. It starts here, with the fear.