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first husband. It looks a little tired now, but it still has a Grateful Dead ribbon,’ she says, dropping a flick of ash on my trousers. ‘Or at least it did.’
    â€˜You knew the Grateful Dead?’
    â€˜I played with them on one track.’
    â€˜With your first husband?’
    â€˜With my second.’
    About the same time that Ginsberg caught a boat to Athens, before travelling onward to India, Penny’s first husband left her a widow.
    â€˜No tears, Jack,’ she instructs me, her bangles ringing as she traces a cross over her heart. ‘The Dalai Lama teaches that all is transient.’
    â€˜Did he play with the Grateful Dead too?’
    A wheat-brown country unfolds beyond the high-rise neighbourhoods. We follow the route of the ancient road, as did Eurasian camel trains and solo hitchhikers, as does a covered woman leading her cow. A cement works sprawls along the blue edge of the Sea of Marmara, salt water washing against the plains, a freighter moored beyond the harvesters.
    â€˜Things always happen to me,’ Penny goes on, turning towards me, her spectacles magnifying her wildly kohled, outsized eyes. ‘I follow my instincts and end up in happening places: London, Tangier, San Francisco. Only sometimes does stuff go wrong, like it did in Nepal in the end.’
    â€˜I want to hear about California,’ I say, and she tells me about Kesey and his magic bus. About the copy of
Journey to the East
on his bookshelf in La Honda. About the links to the trail and Kathmandu.
    The bus wheels spin eastwards. The drivers change near a city called Adapazari. The Nike mother sleeps. Her son dances in the aisle. I put on my earphones to ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Alexander the Great travelled this way, Hannibal took his life near here in 182 BC. Along this route marched St Paul, Crusaders and – in due course – luminous Penny.
    On the outskirts of Bolu, she starts to snore. We skirt eroded mountains, climb into conifer woods, rise above them on to a spreading plateau which gives way to a second plain, more arid and broader still. A duck-egg-blue reservoir – Sakarya – flares on the horizon. A purple mountain – Sömidiken Dag – shimmers out of the heat. The deserted hills are raw and desolate, daubed by an occasional flush of purple lupins or a tight bounty of green pear trees. I lift my eye above the page to follow the stretching road across a continental vista of timeless steppe.
    At the heart of the black Anatolian plateau 280 miles east of Istanbul, Ankara is a modern, planned capital of brushed-steel ministries and car dealerships grafted on to Hittite foundations. Most Intrepids paused here only long enough to visit the Iranian and Afghan embassies. The windswept city offered them nothingmore uplifting than wide views of a dank malarial plain. We, too, plan to hurry on.
    â€˜This place still looks like a dump,’ yawns Penny, blinking out the window as we pull into the sweeping coach station, its wings of buses stretching out toward all parts of the country. ‘Last time, we got stuck here for a week waiting for visas.’
    We have an hour’s break before our connecting service so, after settling her in the Yeni restaurant, I visit the offices of the regional coach operator to ask about services a generation ago. Twenty minutes before departure, I’m back at the restaurant. But she isn’t at the Yeni. I look at the departure gate. I ask in the waiting room. I call by the tourist police. She’s nowhere to be found.
    Then I spot her sitting cross-legged on the floor laughing with four Western kids.
    â€˜We’ve got seven minutes until the bus leaves,’ I tell Penny, picking up her pack, feeling protective of her. ‘Sorry to break up the party.’
    â€˜There’s been a change of plan, Jack,’ she says, pulling free of my hand.
    â€˜Debs and I are driving to Treehouses,’ the first English