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Bob had presence and style, rare in a backpacker on the Silk Road, and smoked so many Red Star cigarettes it seemed she couldn\'t take a breath without one. When she wasn\'t smoking, or sipping suan nai (Chinese yogurt) through a straw, or throwing out shockers like "It\'s important to get a good lay every so often," she painted her lips with crimson lipstick and pinched the owner of the caf?as he walked by. She answered my startled look in Chinese. "Wo shi Helan ren. I\'m Dutch," she said with a shrug. She had effortlessly styled white hair, a red bandanna knotted at her throat, impossibly smooth skin and blue eyes. A photographer\'s vest gave her bulk and plenty of pockets to hide money and Red Stars. This trip, her twelfth trudging around China in hiking boots, had begun three months after her 74th birthday. Specialized tours make their way out to see the Flaming Mountains and the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Cave, a reminder of Turpan\'s pre-8th century Buddhist past, but for the most part the hottest place in China is for hardier travelers. It was at John\'s Information Caf? the trellised offshoot of the original John\'s in Kashgar, that Bob cocked her head to the side and called me over to her table. It was like being summoned by Martha Gellhorn. Bob and I held court at John\'s for several days, our conversations running the gamut from moon signs to terrorism. Finally we bid Turpan, and each other, farewell and promised to keep in touch the old-fashioned way as her adventurous spirit did not extend to the Internet. Eight months later I showed up on her doorstep. She greeted me with a mug of Irish coffee and a kiss, stamping my cheek with a scarlet lip-print like a customs official. My arrival, although simultaneous with the assassination of the right-wing candidate for Prime Minister not ten minutes from Bob\'s home, seemed as natural for each of us as it had been to meet for the first time. Bob\'s apartment reflected her peripatetic lifestyle: zebra wall-coverings and boar rugs documented the six African safaris; the collection of more than 100 Chinese movies rivaled that of any foreign-language video store; and bookcases groaned with first editions in Mandarin, Dutch, English and French. Thirteen cacophonous little birds played backup for Fred the parrot. In Holland she traded her travelling bandana for a beret to match every outfit; but sartorial differences aside she was the Bob I met in the Chinese desert. My inaugural view of the magnificent tulips at the Kuchenhof marked her first visit to the gardens in more than forty years. We both cried over the first prize winner in the World Press Photo exhibit: a shot of a small Muslim child wrapped in a white shroud and attended by the hands of his parents and grandparents. We spied Buttman, an Amsterdam local who sashays the streets in broad daylight in nothing other than a leather jacket, thigh-high platform boots and a black pleather jock strap. We visited her husband\'s ashes, scattered in a tree-covered cemetery, and she told me of her plans for her ashes to be strewn off the island of Putuoshan, near Shanghai. We zipped around in her fiery red Jeep, her trademark filter-less Red Stars exchanged for anorexic brown cigarettes. (She thought of everything: she could let the cigarette hang from her mouth as she shifted gears without having tobacco bits stick to her lip.) She sped gleefully around all of the roundabouts, a relatively new addition to the Dutch countryside, but cursed the periodic speed bumps that made her slow down and perhaps not beat the man revving his midlife crisis engine next to her. In the evenings, she told me stories over small glasses of sherry. War stories, including her continued admiration for Canadians of a certain age, the liberators she remembered from the war. Love stories, which I promised never to repeat. Sad stories, such as her late husband\'s slow deterioration and her own month-long convalescence in a Chinese hospital after she contracted, and nearly succumbed to, Legionnaires Disease. She listened to my stories as well. As she already knew, just moments before September 11th, I had left a New England autumn for three and a half months in China and Vietnam. But after leaving her in China, I then spent an equal amount of time going west from Eger, a small wine village in eastern Hungary where the local produce sells in large plastic bottles for 2 euros. My last port of call (although I only took two boats--one in the Mekong Delta and then the ferry crossing from Dover to Calais--nautical terms lend a necessary touch of class to my el cheapo travels) would be my sister\'s apartment in Marseilles. I spent my time writing in Prague\'s graveyards and searching fruitlessly for cheap accommodation in Bratislava. I bemoaned the ever-increasing prices as I headed west.(Whittling my daily expenditure in China from $20 to $8 was fun; going budget with so many great plays showing in the West End, slightly less fun.) While I was reading testimonials left at Khe Sanh, testing my Mandarin in the Taklamakan desert, and spraining my ankle running amidst the May Day riots in Berlin, my friends and family were working, researching, celebrating birthdays, paying rent, and graduating. In other words, living in the real world. "Forget budgets for a minute," Bob wisely said. "What about the people you met along the way?" So I told her about my fellow human pretzel during the weeks spent stretching and groaning at the Shaolin Temple; my Australian co-initiates into Budapest\'s thermal baths; my friend now trying to break into Berlin\'s cabaret cabaret scene. And she poured another sherry, and we talked on. Eventually I left to wind my way to Marseilles, now laden with Dutch nursery rhymes Bob had translated into English and Mandarin, one of her floppy hats, and a skillet to make tiny Dutch pancakes when I finally ended up back home. Bob drove me to the train station, but wouldn\'t say goodbye. She just told me to write, and to show up on her doorstep again sometime.
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