The Hungry Travellers.

In the fall of 1985, a few months after China opened the Tibetan border, Jeffrey Alford, from Laramie, met Naomi Duguid, from Toronto, on the roof of a hotel dormitory for foreigners in Lhasa. It was ten at night, and since there were no lights on the roof to see by they sat in the dark, listening to the sound of chimes and chanting, and began to talk--which turns out to have been the best way to get acquainted. They had this in common: they were restless; they were at home in strange and forbidding places; they were attached to the early albums of Herbie Hancock; and they liked to eat. But it was hard to imagine them getting acquainted in what you would call the real world--let alone getting married, writing cookbooks, and ending up members in high standing of a small, scholarly circle of food writers whose work leaves the rest of the food world far behind, collecting recipes.

Duguid, known to her friends as Nom, was a tall, streaky-blond, hazel-eyed lawyer of thirty-five, with a house and a boyfriend at home, and she was travelling through Asia on a five-month work sabbatical, hoping to resolve the question of why the offer of a partnership in the Toronto firm where she had labored happily for nearly five years had made her want to flee. Alford was thirty-one, a tall, skinny, ponytailed seeker of truth with a master's degree in creative writing, a passion for the East, a light heroin habit, and a reputation for supporting his wanderlust with tag sales in his parents' front yard--his father was a vice-president of the University of Wyoming--and with odd jobs as a gold and cash courier on the South Asia smuggling circuit. At the time, he and five recruits were getting ready to cross the Himalayas, from Lhasa to Kathmandu, on mountain bikes, for a magazine called Bicycle Rider, which was planning to run a piece by Alford about cycling in Tibet. Duguid was travelling with the eighty-two-year-old Swiss writer Ella Maillart, a legendary adventurer whose letters Nehru once claimed had saved his sanity in prison, and whom Duguid had met for the first time that September in another foreigners' dorm, in Kunming. "Nom always meets everybody," Alford says. "Even me."

The logistics of love are daunting at twelve thousand feet--Alford describes their attempt at a kiss as "two sheets of sandpaper scraping"--but not, as it were, insurmountable. Ten days later, Duguid wrote a letter of resignation to her law firm--"Dear guys, It's not the altitude, but I'm not coming back"--placed an awkward call to her boyfriend, and set out to explore Nepal with a couple of anthropologists she had just met, while Alford finished his assignment. She wasn't worried about their future, because they had already covered all the big, important "life things." Did they want a family? Could they have one and keep travelling? How would they pay for "a life open to the world"? By November, they had made their way south to Thailand and were camped on an island beach, where Alford started to withdraw. ("I had scored this big hit in Hong Kong. I gave it away. But I had thought, How do I explain this part of my life to Nom? She was great.") It took four days, and they got through them talking about all the places that were left to see, and how to get there.

A month later, they flew home. Alford met Duguid's friends, including her old law-firm colleagues at Sack Charney Goldblatt Mitchell, whose view of her defection, as she describes it, ran from disbelief to "We're sorry for us but exhilarated for you." Duguid met Alford's friends and got to know his family. Her own family--her father, a navigational engineer; her mother, a physiotherapist for disabled children; and her only brother--had died by the time she was twenty-seven, and she told the Alfords that until Jeff "so much loss" had kept her running from anything like a settled life. A few months later, they were married and back in Asia, crossing the Pamir and Karakoram mountains--from Kashgar, in the Turkik province of Xinjiang, to Gilgit, in Pakistan--on a pair of red mountain bikes.

They began writing together about biking together, perhaps because in those days Duguid was better on a bike than in the kitchen, where long workdays had left her pretty much limited to baking bread--something her mother had taught her--and boiling pasta. But Alford, by his account, was already obsessed with food. He had cooked his way through his mother's "Joy of Cooking" by the age of twenty, worked as "the saute guy" at a fancy Laramie restaurant as a University of Wyoming undergraduate, and learned the rudiments of Thai cooking from a student from Bangkok who worked there with him. He was also passionate about baking. When he wrote his master's thesis--his adviser, the novelist John Edgar Wideman, had told him, "Write me a story about the things you know"--he called it "Bread, Travel, and Drugs," which just about covered nine months he had just spent in a cottage-cum-student crash pad on the Dingle Peninsula, hiking, smoking pot, and perfecting his landlady's recipe for Irish soda bread. "I love utilitarian things," he says. "I loved being in that kitchen, I loved the smell of the bread and the steamy windows and my sour-green-apple jam sitting on the sill." After a month in the Pamirs--in the course of which he tasted "some amazing flat-breads," and confessed to Duguid that he wanted to write a flatbread book--he started looking through food magazines and said to her, "Wait a minute, I can do this. I know more about food than anything." Their first food article, "Delicious Asian Flatbreads," appeared in Bon Appetit in 1988. (They got a thousand dollars for it, or about what Duguid would have been bringing in for a day's work as a partner ...