"No, I really am," he insisted, "and I’m going to write a book."

After a few moments’ contemplation, I realized that I was well on the way to becoming the embittered employee who snarls at anyone who has the motivation to move on. I emailed the paper’s travel editor: Could I travel around the world for a year and write a column about it? To my amazement, she said yes. Within three weeks, I was stepping onto a plane, having left my job, sold my car, and moved out of my rented apartment.

Traveling alone was terrifying, at times. For the first three months, I appreciated each day only as a step closer to my return home to familiar sights, sounds and, above all, people. I felt lost, adrift. Then I began to realize that I was free to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to do it. As long as I filed a column every two weeks, I could be anybody.

It is one of the hardest things in the world to walk into a crowded Vietnamese bar, alone, and talk to strangers. Only the fact that, otherwise, I wasn’t going to speak at all forced me to do it. When I met some fellow travelers heading in the same direction as me, my confidence grew, and soon after that I realized I was having the time of my life.

The year flew by. I cycled to an ancient temple in Laos. I worked as an extra on the set of The Beach in Thailand. I spent 24 hours as the conspicuous lone foreigner on a Chinese train. Two days before I was due to fly from Chengdu, in China, to Lhasa, in Tibet, I met a man in a bar. James came from Wales, and he was booked on my flight to Tibet. We spent the next three months travelling in Nepal, India, and Pakistan, and got married two years later.

Flying into Heathrow Airport at the end of the year was completely disorientating. James and I had each other, but we had nowhere to live, no jobs, and no money. I had always wanted to write a novel, but had never had the confidence to sit down in front of a blank screen and type the first page.

Now, I was determined to do it. I did enough freelance journalism to pay the rent and spent all the rest of my time fictionalizing my traveling experiences. The story moved further and further from my own, and now all it has in common is the Asian setting. BACKPACK was published in Britain in 2001, and I am now able to work as a full time novelist.