They didn’t do this on a whim, spending nearly three years saving for their grand venture. But when they started actually planning their trip, things took an even more ambitious turn. They decided to circumnavigate the globe without flying.   

As Tuppen explains, the decision wasn’t initially driven by environmental reasons. “We literally just bought a giant map and started marking out places around the world we wanted to see or things we wanted to do,” Tuppen says. “We started drawing lines between [destinations] and trying to work out what we could do overland or over the ocean.   

They didn’t let this epiphany pass – the pair committed wholly to travelling the world without boarding a plane. This was, after all, the epitome of the big adventure they were chasing.   

The trip began on a tandem bike in the middle of London’s Hyde Park. For the first leg, they cycled from England down to the Pyrenees in Spain, then walked the Camino de Santiago across the north of the country. When it came time to start crossing oceans, they used Crewseekers to find sailboats looking for crew members.  

“In our case, a sailing boat wanted to pick people up in Portugal to then sail down to Morocco and then to the Canary Islands and across to the Caribbean,” Tuppen says. “Being becalmed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for five days was one of the most surreal experiences of my life, the ultimate slow travel.”  

This was just the beginning of what would be a 20-month trip without boarding a single plane. As they discovered, with the right mix of tenacity and perseverance, an alternative route will always appear. They hitchhiked around China’s Taklamakan Desert, rode through the Rockies on their tandem bike, crossed from Beijing to Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian Railway and travelled as guests on a container ship from Vancouver to Pusan in South Korea. 

Things weren’t always planned, nor did they always go to plan. And naturally, choosing not to fly came with inevitable difficulties, particularly in countries where an onward ticket is a requirement of entry. But Tuppen doesn’t look back in frustration. “Having that challenge pushed us to do more interesting things and go to places you would normally skip if you were flying,” she says. “You miss out on those slightly rough around the edges places, or places that tourists don’t go to or you don’t read about anywhere. Those places were part of the appeal.”   

When we think about not flying, what often comes to mind is what we miss: convenience, time and comfort. But Tuppen’s experience provides a powerful counter-argument for what we stand to gain by slowing down and embracing alternative modes of transport. Environmental and cultural benefits aside, she says one of the positives that has stayed with her the longest is the uniqueness of the interactions she had along the way.