After spending New Year's Eve in Kenya and the past four months on a solo, self-guided backpack trek through Sri Lanka, Laos, and Vietnam, the English supermodel Jacquetta Wheeler is back in Manhattan. At a welcome-home dinner at the Waverly Inn on Friday (followed by a stop at the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel), the weary traveler observed, "In some ways I feel like I've been gone forever, and in some ways I feel like I never left." What did she miss most while she was away? "More than good food or drinks—though the local rice wine was pretty good—or particular places or stores or anything, what I missed most was my friends," she said, giving a wink to pals Keren Craig of Marchesa and Rockstar Games' Lyonel Tollemache. This wasn't the first time that the lanky lass has tackled faraway lands on her own; in the fall of 2006, your loyal Style.com scribe accompanied her on a month-and-a-half-long trek through Northern India. After a few weeks of curry and youth hostels, I headed back to New York, while Wheeler headed south to explore tea farms and beaches. "I've developed a real taste for this sort of thing," she said with a big smile, adding that she's toyed with the idea of getting into National Geographic-esque nature photography and is already pondering her next voyage. Not that she wouldn't have minded a companion once or twice on her last journey—like when rabid dogs attacked her well-worn sneakers or when a menacing black bird kept swooping down on her. "Still, I was glad I did it alone," she said. "I really got to know myself better."