For five years I was a professional party girl, chasing celebrities around champagne-fuelled parties at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscars, eavesdropping on stars gossiping in the loos at members-only clubs and attending every launch party, awards ceremony and film premiere.
I worked on the Daily Mirror's 3am gossip column, meeting everyone from George Clooney (who didn't disappoint in the flesh) and Brad Pitt (who did) to Kylie, Tom Cruise, David Beckham (very flirty) and Jude Law (who has a lollipop head on a scrawny little body).
It felt like the best job in the world. I interviewed my showbiz heroes; blagged my way onto a James Bond set, only to have my cardigan ripped off me by Pierce Brosnan, who then rubbed my goose pimples to keep me warm; got drunk and took drugs with other stars; ran out of randy celebs' hotel rooms; and gained access to some of the best parties and awards ceremonies around the world.
But after five years, the excitement was starting to wear off. It was a miracle I hadn't ended up in rehab like so many of the stars I wrote about. You can't be a half-hearted gossip columnist. It's all or nothing.
I had always wanted to travel. My parents had banned me from taking a gap year after my A-levels in case I never came back. The more I thought about following my dream of backpacking around the world, the more I realised there was no going back. Two close friends who worked in showbiz, Sam and Sarah, were also fed up with the daily grind in London with nothing to show for it but overdrafts and bad dating stories. The timing was right for all of us.
In June 2005, after saving up for eight months, we booked round-the-world tickets through Trailfinders (we planned to go to India, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela) and a week later we all handed in our notice to our bosses.
My colleagues were stunned by my decision. They couldn't understand why I'd want to leave such a fabulous job to become a backpacker. They also pondered how I'd exist without my hair straighteners.
'Go for it,' said the editor, Richard Wallace, adding: 'I'm going to put a bet on that you'll be found dead of an overdose in a ladyboy drug den in Bangkok in your first week!'
My mother was appalled at my decision. 'But only kids go on gap years! You're 30. You can't carry a backpack around at your age. Get a suitcase on wheels at least,' she instructed me.
On 5 October 2005, Sarah, Sam and I flew to Delhi for the first stop on our grand adventure. Friends suggested chilling out on a beach for the first few weeks, but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to throw myself straight into the mayhem.
Less than a week after I had left my job, life and flat in London, I was on a fisherman's boat at dawn, gliding along the Ganges in Varanasi, the holiest place to die in India. Funeral pyres with dead people's feet poking out crackled on the banks of the polluted river. All around us holy men were standing semi-naked in the brown water, performing early-morning religious rituals. Sitting in that boat, I couldn't believe that I used to get so wound up about hunting down Sienna Miller's latest boyfriend. I was happier than I had been in years.
Within days of arriving in India I sent a package home with half the contents of my backpack. I had no real need for a - wait for it - cashmere Juicy Couture tracksuit while backpacking. It was fantastically liberating not to wear make-up or high heels or use a hairdryer. After two years of being addicted to my hair straighteners, I quickly embraced the greasy-haired curly look. In India's steaming cities, I had no choice.
Living in such close proximity to my friends was something we had been worried about, but in the end it felt like one endless pyjama party. A friend back home, Niki, resigned from her job on another newspaper as she was envious of our email travelling updates and 'fed up with ruining people's lives'. Luckily, as she's only 5ft 1, she didn't take up much room in the cramped camper van for our four-week road trip down the east coast of Australia.
When we arrived in New Zealand I did wonder whether we'd be the oldest guests in the hostels, but it wasn't the case. We spent three weeks there and met travellers of every age group, every background and every walk of life.
In fact New Zealand and Australia were the scenes of some of our most teenage-like behaviour. I had an enormous tattoo of my family crest done on my bottom and Niki had her tongue pierced. She removed the bolt from her swollen tongue a few months later. I, alas, will have my nine-inch griffin for life.
One of my main aims for the trip was to take part in activities that would scare me witless. I made sure I didn't inform my parents of my 15,000-foot skydive above Lake Taupo, New Zealand, until after the event. Flinging myself out of a plane, freefalling, forgetting to breathe in my excitement (and nearly blacking out as a result) but then landing safely on my feet, was the highlight of my adventure activities.
Trekking up the Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand, getting to grips with a trapeze in Byron Bay in Australia and horse-riding in the sea in Brazil and Venezuela remain some of my most cherished memories. And of course tumbling down the Death Slide in South America's largest waterpark was a high point. Top tip: don't wear a teeny-weeny Brazilian bikini on a waterslide.
Crime and illness are two aspects that put a lot of people off travelling. I was incredibly lucky. Health-wise, the worst I experienced was a 12-hour vomiting bug in Mumbai. No one got mugged, attacked or even threatened. Sarah had her flip flops nicked on Ipanema beach when she went for a dip in the sea. But at £4 a pair for Havaianas out there, she wasn't too grief-stricken.
I quickly adapted to life on the road, living out of my backpack on a very tight budget. One of my favourite locations was a £1-a-night beach hut with no electricity and a communal hole in the ground for a loo in Gokarna, India. I learnt that I was far tougher than I had given myself credit for. Flying insects and cockroaches? No problem. A friend didn't even flinch when she stumbled upon a rat chewing one of her bikinis in her hut.
One major pitfall we hadn't anticipated was the opposite sex. A male friend joined us for three weeks in New Zealand. I had a brief fling with him but after we called it off, it quickly became apparent that he'd taken a fancy to Sarah. For weeks we all pretended nothing was happening and when it did come out in the open, it was awkward and a bit humiliating. When you're on the road with friends, there really is no escape from each other. You will experience the best of them and the worst. The secret is to constantly communicate your feelings with one another. Bottling up feelings of resentment over petty rows can blow up into huge fights if you're not careful.
By the end of the seventh month away, we decided it was time to go home. Money was running low and there is only so long you can laze around on a beach in Venezuela.
There's something alluring about suspending reality while away. When you're on a two-week holiday, worries about life back home ebb away. After seven months on the road, I no longer knew what my reality was back in the UK. But I was adamant I couldn't return to my previous incarnation as a gossip columnist. It would have felt like a step backwards.
Travelling gave me a sense of freedom I'd never experienced before. The biggest day-to-day decision was what to eat and drink and when to move on to the next place. I couldn't envisage myself working in an office again. I had learnt that there was more to life than climbing the career ladder and I wanted to cling onto that lesson.
Despite my worries about settling back into life in London, it took me four months to get back into the swing of things. I discovered life had remained the same back home. But I had changed. Going travelling gave me the confidence to achieve another ambition. I wrote a book last summer about my adventures as a gossip columnist and am now working on my next one. And I've managed to squeeze in four trips abroad this year... so far. Well, you've got to have something to look forward to, haven't you?
· Wicked Whispers, Confessions of a Gossip Queen, by Jessica Callan is published by Michael Joseph on 5 July
