Well, there was the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down the local.

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Step this way for an alternative economy

Mark Boyle (or Saoirse, as he is now known) has set out to walk 12,000km to Gandhi's birthplace in India. His mission? To prove that his dream of living in amoney-free community really does have legs.

I am worried about his feet. As soon as he comes into sight I am peering downwards, and he obligingly sticks out a Birkenstock-clad foot for a closer look: the "boys", as he calls them on his blog, have become famous in their own right. After two weeks of solid walking from his starting point in Bristol - 20-25 miles a day - a fungal infection has got hold of the nail on the big toe of the right foot and it is lifting right away. Saoirse (or Mark Boyle, as he was christened) says he might just rip the whole thing off.

"It's all right," he says. "I've got blisters, but bombs are falling on Iraq."

There is plenty more to worry about, and something about this man - his gentleness, his overactive conscience, his poor feet - brings out all my maternal instincts. Saoirse, 28, still has another two and a half years of walking to go, carrying no money and very few possessions, and relying just on the kindness and generosity of strangers and contacts that he has made through his website, along a hair-raising route through France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the ultimate destination: Gandhi's birthplace in India. He is undertaking this extraordinary pilgrimage to promote the idea of "freeconomy", a web-based money-free community.

It all began when Saoirse (Gaelic for "freedom" and pronounced "sear-shuh") was studying business and economics at Galway University. "One day I watched the film Gandhi, and it just changed the whole course of my life. I took the next day off lectures to start reading about him, and after that I just couldn't read enough, it made me see the whole world in a different way."

Gandhi's exhortation to "be the change you want to see in the world" had particular meaning for him, and then, a few years later, "I was sitting with a couple of friends and we were talking, as usual, about all the things that are going wrong - sweatshops, war and famine etc. And I realised that the root of all our problems is all the fear and insecurity and greed that manifests itself in our quest formoney. So what would happen if you just got rid of money?"

The idea behind the Freeconomy website (justfortheloveofit.org) is that you sign up and list all the available skills and abilities and tools you have, and donate them to others. In return you may make use of other people's skills, a bit like Local Exchange Trading Schemes (letslinkuk.org) which have been running for almost two decades. For example, people borrow power tools, have haircuts ("I'm surprised how many people are getting their haircut through it, actually," says Saoirse. "I wouldn't have thought a haircut would have been the first thing you'd have looked for"), or get help on their allotments. For Saoirse, his Freeconomy website and pilgrimage are only the first steps towards his long-term vision to nurture money-free communities where people will live and work and care for each other.

When I meet him in a cafe in Brighton as he is heading to a ferry port to take him across the Channel, he strikes me as an idealist who is going to come unstuck somewhere along the way. I ask anxiously about his planning for the journey, and he says that he is leaving it all in the hands of fate. So far, he has been in places where his friends and fellow Freeconomists can help him, so mainly he has had arrangements for places to sleep and eat. Otherwise, he tries to talk to people, to explain what he is doing and hope that they will help him out - his T-shirt says, in big letters, "Community Pilgrim". He has had one bad night already; in Dorchester, he ran out of food and got there too late to find shelter and had to camp by the road. He admits that he had been briefly tempted to turn around and go home.

But his faith in human kindness, rather worryingly, seems to know no bounds. He says he is just going to talk to people and try to persuade them to assist him. Most of the people who meet him along the way will see that he is sincere, if a little unusual. Let's hope so, anyway, as his itinerary is certainly challenging - and he does not have a single visa.

"They don't give visas more than three months in advance," he says, "so I thought I would just go for it."

Will countries such as Iran and Afghanistan just let a westerner - even a gentle hippy such as Saoirse - stroll in? Is there a back-up plan? He says he doesn't really have one because that would be "contrary to the spirit of the thing".

What does his mother think of it all? Apparently, she follows him through the website and is, like his father, fantastically supportive. And is he prepared to be lonely, scared, threatened? He says he has spent the past few months trying to work through the fear, but that he now "just has to do it".

Once I suppress my concerns for his welfare, I find myself thinking that, actually, it is only our cynical, secular age that finds the idea of a pilgrimage odd. Spiritual voyages are built into every religion and, for most believers, Saoirse's faith - that he will be looked after, that it will turn out OK, that this is a good thing to do for humanity - is not odd at all. Other cultures accept the idea of a "good" person, a saint or a prophet: they offer monasteries and disciplines within which to work. But in the western world, the world of the selfish gene, extreme goodness is, according to Richard Dawkins at least, "a misfiring, even a perversion of the Darwinian take on niceness ... from a Darwinian point of view, human super-niceness is just plain dumb". But here it is on a pavement in Brighton.

After nearly an hour's talking, Saoirse is starting to look tired: he makes one final attempt to explain what drives him. "Look, if I've got £100 in the bank and somebody in India dies because they needed some money, then, in a way, the responsibility of that person's death is on me. That's very hardcore, I know, but I've got more than I need and that person needed it. And if you know that, then you've either got to do something about it, or you have to wake up every morning and look at yourself in the mirror."

His eyes are now red-rimmed, I think with emotion and exhaustion. We say our goodbyes. And I cannot help noticing that he is limping. Those poor, poor feet.