When a friend invites you to a wedding on the other side of the world, and your eco-principles mean you refuse to fly, what do you do? You take a 70-day alternative route . . . Ben Bentley tells a local woman’s amazing story

Getting to the church on time is normally a bit of a challenge. But what about if the wedding is 16,000 miles away in Australia and your environmental principles tell you to shun a dirty great aircraft in favour of some more primitive modes of transport – travelling over land by bicycle, hitch-hiking, horsedrawn carriage, public transport, taxi, train, cargo ship?

For 30-year-old Barbara Haddrill of Machynlleth, the clock was ticking . . . the road that stretched out before her traversed three continents and numerous time zones, taking in 18 countries including Belgium, Poland, Russia, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore and Thailand, as well as Wales of course.

And all to be bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding.

“People said ‘Good on you for beliefs, but you are slightly mad’,” Barbara concedes. “And I did wonder at some points if I would get there. My best friend did not expect me to do it. I did not either.”

A writer of some wit and wisdom, she details her whole carbon-busting odyssey in a new book, Babs2Brisbane.

You can see where Barbara is coming from. To be precise, that would be a 12ft caravan on a farm near Machynlleth – a home that is totally off-grid, where power comes from a small hydro-turbine in the nearby river and heating comes from the wood in the surrounding forest.

Around here, when she’s not writing she’s packing vegetables for an organic veg box scheme or in the vegetarian restaurant at the Centre for Alternative Technology, she travels everywhere by bicycle.

It’s the good life alright. But taking it all on tour and having principles while trying to simply survive would have its ups and downs. The trip, and being able to make travel connections by alternative means of transport, would take some planning. Something Barbara didn’t do enough of.

“I left it to the last minute because I found the whole idea very daunting and kept my head buried in the sand,” she admits.

“The worst bit of the journeys was that Australia is an island and there’s a lot of sea around it – how do I get to it? I had a few ideas – sailing a yacht from Japan or China – but in the end I found a cargo ship from Singapore that took 10 days to get to Melbourne.

“It was quite nerve-racking because once I stepped on the boat there was no way I could get off or communicate with anyone. There was no mobile phone reception or a phone on board.

“It’s silly really because people have done this for years – the difference is that this was me and 16 male sailors from Russia, Ukraine and the Philippines and the level of English speaking was variable.”

Barbara admits to feeling nervous and wary, and there was “a lot of staring”.

“But it was fun,” she adds. “Depends what you like really.”

She had her fair share of encounters with nutters, as you do with travelling. People trying to sell her fish when fish was the last thing on her mind. That kind of thing.

Worse still was China and tears in Tiananmen Square.

“I was worried that I was not going to get there because of being unable to communicate,” she continues.

“I thought I’m going to be stuck in Beijing and fail in my journey, and that was difficult. You can point at food and wave notes if you are at a market and want to buy food, but asking about transport . . . I was bawling my eyes out in Tiananmen Square because I just felt stuck.”

On top of her transport woes came the added problem of trying to maintain her ‘green’ principles of recycling whatever waste she created. And the idea of eating locally produced food turned her trip into a journey of world food.

“It was important to stick to that so I would buy local food and go to the local market,” says Barbara.

“Vietnam was amazing for food but I did try a few unusual things such as insects in Thailand that tasted like deep fried grease rather than a lizard or a cricket.”

Travelling through the Australian outback was hairy too. And that was just the Aussie truckers she hitch-hiked with. Spending 48 hours in the cab of a grunting stranger was “a million miles from the type people I know”.

What kept her going through the tricky times was writing her blog, which made her feel she was not alone, and playing the accordion she had taken with her.

Thankfully the highs outweighed the lows and a favourite leg of Barbara’s journey was a trip on the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Beijing, covering 6,000 miles in six days and passing through seven time zones. Fellow passengers will remember her, too, for entertaining them with her squeezebox.

“It was amazing and really relaxing because for once there was no pressure,” says Barbara. “I had got worked up about it but once I was on the train you just felt the land go past.

“Siberia is so massive – for a couple of days you are just looking at pine trees, then it gradually changes to grassland and slowly the lushness of Asia.”

Fifty days and 16,000 miles later she sauntered down the aisle in Brisbane, right on time.

Now for the return journey. Here she was, thousands of miles from home and now without a plan of how to get back home, with little or no money and with visas that had expired. “Ad hoc” is how she describes her travel plans, but at least there was another incentive – appropriately there was another wedding to attend upon her return to Shropshire.

Even at a fair gallop the trip took her more than 70 days, the last lap alone from Paris to Wales by bicycle.

And just as she’d set off from her caravan door in Mid-Wales in the rain, she returned to her caravan door in the rain. A comforting welcome home, truth be told.

The strange thing in all this landlubbing is this: Barbara is actually not much of a traveller.

“I’m a reluctant traveller,” she explains. “I love where I’m living and I only travel locally. I’m glad I did it but I’m happy to stay in Wales.”