PLANNING a wedding is one of the most stressful things you can do – so Asha Nayaka and Damien Tudjman must be gluttons for punishment.

To keep their friends and families happy, they had three lavish big days on three continents – all within a month.

The couple live in London, but Asha’s mum and dad have retired to Sri Lanka and Damien’s live in Sydney.

So with the help of their parents and a couple of bank loans they stumped up £30,000 to travel more than 20,000 miles to hold their dream weddings in all three countries.

“I guess you could say they were the happiest days of our lives,” says Asha, 32. “So many people say theirs was the perfect day but it went too quickly and it’s true – so I’m glad we could do it again and again.

“It all began when we got engaged and my parents got really excited and started planning a wedding in Sri Lanka on the beach.

“Then Damien’s parents got excited about having it in Sydney. Initially, we thought we’d have two ceremonies to keep them happy. But then we realised most of our friends couldn’t fly over because it would be too expensive.”

Soon the pair, from Tower Hill hit upon the solution to their problem – a wedding tour.

First, they had a fancy-dress garden wedding on July 15, 2006, in Surrey, followed by a beach ceremony in Sri Lanka on July 29 and, a fortnight later, a Catholic service in Sydney.

“Thankfully, each of our parents helped out with planning the weddings in Sri Lanka and Australia,” Damien, a teacher, explains.

“They’d send us DVD recordings of locations they’d found. They also emailed over pictures of flowers and table arrangements to choose from. It was a lot of work, but it was exciting as well.”

Asha, who works in marketing, continues: “Damien and I like fancy-dress parties so we decided to have a fancy-dress wedding.

“I wore a purple ball gown with gold trimmings and a huge tiara – it was so over planthe top. Damien wore a top hat and had a cane. It was just how we wanted it – no tradition. We had a trampoline, croquet, a steel band and I invited a surprise guest even Damien didn’t know about – a Michael Jackson impersonator. Everyone had a ball.”

Then they flew to Asia for their second wedding in Sri Lanka – a traditional Buddhist ceremony where Asha wore an embroidered cream sari.

“I needed a team of people to get me into it because it was skin-tight,” she recalls. “It was a beautiful ceremony on the beach. Damien was led out by a procession of dancers and drummers, then I was led out with my dad and the same dancers, followed by an elephant. The ceremony was two hours long and was hugely symbolic.”

But the day wasn’t without its hiccups. Asha recalls: “My dad took all the men’s suits, which were cream with a red embroidery, to the dry-cleaners a couple of days before the wedding to make sure they were spotless. But the suits ran and went pink. They had to be dry-cleaned again and again to get the stains out.”

A fortnight later, the pair were bound for Sydney. “Damien’s family are devout Catholics,” Asha says. “So I had a white full-length dress with a veil. It was orthodox, which we wouldn’t have done if it had been our only wedding day, but it was nice to do it after the other two.”

Afterwards the couple hopped in a white stretch limo and had their wedding photos taken in front of the famous Harbour Bridge.

“It was only after this wedding that it finally all sunk in that we were married,” Damien laughs. “We joked that with the first two we were just testing the water.” The couple then embarked on a three-month honeymoon afterwards, travelling around Australia, New Zealand and South America.

Asha adds: “We spent all our evenings hand-making the invitations and table arrangements to save money and it actually feels very strange now not to have a wedding to plan.

“The standard joke is if we got divorced we’d have to do that three times.

“But there’s no chance of that happening!” They were happiest days of our lives [www.mirror.co.uk]