Meet the England fan who is heading to this winter's Ashes without taking a single flight

Ed Miller will travel from the Oval to Brisbane without his feet leaving the ground and all for a good cause

Ed Miller has chosen an unconventional way to travel to this winter's Ashes

After this week’s third Test at the Oval, England will finish the series at Old Trafford before hosting the West Indies for three Tests, one T20 and five ODIs, the long late conclusion of the English summer. After resting in October, they head to Australia, and on 23 November will be at the Gabba to begin their defence of the Ashes.

But for one England fan, Ed Miller, those four months will not be spent watching the team. Yes, he will wave goodbye to them at the Oval on Thursday, and then he will be there in the crowd in Brisbane on 23 November for the start of that series.

The journey, though, will be unlike that of any other member of England’s loyal support. He will be travelling half-way round the world without ever taking a flight. Even if it does mean taking the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Beijing and trying, when he reaches Bali, to get a ride on someone’s boat across the Timor Sea to Australia.

It is an ambitious and quixotic plan, one dedicated to charity and inspired by Michael Palin, Charlie Boorman and Graham Hughes, the British adventurer who was the first ever person to visit all 193 United Nations member states without one journey by air. Miller will not be taking in quite as many, though his current plan is for 21.

“Graham Hughes did every country in the world without a plane, and my version is a very small version of that,” Miller explained to The Independent last week. “I thought it would give me a grasp of how big the world is. It is easy to jump on a plane and eight, 10, 12 hours later you’re at the destination, miles from home.”

This trip will be the opposite of that. It will start for Miller on Thursday evening with a Eurostar from St Pancras to Brussels, before he travels by train through Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia and Poland before getting to Moscow on 28 August. Meanwhile in Leeds, England will be playing the West Indies in the second of their three-Test series.

Miller is fundraising for the Oddballs Foundation (www.theedventures.com)

From there Miller will take the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow, stopping in Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk in Russia and Ulan Bator in Mongolia before arriving in Beijing roughly 12 days later, during the last Test of the English summer, back at Lord’s. Miller will then spend most of September in China and Hong Kong before seeing South Korea, Japan and possibly Taiwan.

Then our intrepid explorer will head south, taking his time through Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. It is when he gets to Bali that he will face the hardest part of his journey: trying to get down to Australia without flying. This is when he will have to improvise.

“It is not commercially possible to get to Australia,” Miller explains. “There is the tanker option, but probably the most likely is a private yacht. There are websites looking for someone as a deadhand, with no experience, who would take you for a fee or if you are happy to help out on board.”

This is when the whole adventure might falter. “That is clearly going to be the most challenging bit,” Miller admits, “there is nothing that I can really book. But if the hardest thing was the first leg, then it wouldn’t make the whole thing as challenging.”

Miller expects to arrive in Darwin, although he isn’t fussy, and would then work his way down to Brisbane for the first Test. That would be final leg, at least before the five-Test series itself starts, and the culmination of an epic undertaking.

It is not just one man’s long holiday, though, it is all for a good cause. Miller is raising money for the Oddballs Foundation, a charity close to his heart after he had a testicle removed in 2009, with a suspected tumour that turned out to be benign. “Having gone through that, it gave me an affinity to the cause,” he says, “so I want to try to raise awareness and money.” He will be charting his trip on his blog, TheEdVentures.com.

And it comes at a time in Miller’s life when he has money to spend and was due to take time off work anyway. “I was meant to be getting married this summer, but it was called off,” he says. “So I am taking a year off teaching with the money I was going to spend, I had £20,000 saved up for the wedding and honeymoon. I was going to blow it all on one day anyway.” Now that money will be stretched out for months, taking Miller from the Oval to the Gabba, all the way through to the SCG. Even if he is taking the long route to get there.