Robert Mellin shows the view from his apartment in Philadelphia, his home when he's not traveling the world. Last week at 87, he left for his most recent trip.

PHILADELPHIA — When Robert “Rocky” Mellin was 40 and feeling restless, he met an Australian woman whose tales of adventure became a siren song he still can’t shake.

Mellin, 87, estimates he’s spent 10 years traveling outside of the United States since then. He’s been to more than 60 countries, traveling cheap with a backpack, usually for months, sometimes years.

Last week, Mellin embarked on a three-month adventure in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos.

He was born in Atlantic City and moved to Philadelphia as a teen, graduating from Bartram High School. He moved to Miami at 27 and fixed furniture for moving companies. He has long since forgotten the name of his Australian muse, but shortly after they met, he bought a Europass train ticket and boarded a German freighter in Tampa Bay, bound for Rotterdam.

He talks about meeting new people, marveling at majestic sights, and taking in new cultures, but there’s other stuff too. In Afghanistan, Mellin smoked on the head of an ancient Buddha that’s since been destroyed by the Taliban. There were a few bouts of hepatitis.

Once, caught in the proverbial “wrong place, wrong time,” Mellin was busted by Bolivian narcos and the U.S. consulate had to get him out of jail. The worst was the night he left a bar in Peru, and a stranger asked for the time. “I knew that was bad,” he said. The mugger, Mellin said, put him in a chokehold, and he blacked out. That’s how he got a raspy voice.

Mellin said those moments are as memorable as the vibes he felt at Stonehenge during sunset, or his journey into India where he lived at the Rumtek Monastery. He won’t say traveling has made him wiser, but he does feel connected to a greater global community.