Karl Bushby is back on British soil, but he is not home yet. The 57-year-old former paratrooper waded onto Shakespeare Beach, just south of Dover, on Monday 5 October after swimming the English Channel from France. Hull, the city he left on 5 October 1998, is still about 400 km (roughly 250 miles) of English road away, and he expects to reach his mother Angela’s house there in early November. He has not seen her since 2015.
The Channel was the last stretch of water on a route he set out to cover under two rules: no motorized transport to move forward, and no going home until the line was unbroken. Eurotunnel turned down his request to walk the Channel Tunnel’s service passage, citing safety and operations, so he swam instead after French authorities gave permission. Wearing a wetsuit, he spent about 20 hours in the water spread over three days, sleeping on a support boat and restarting each morning from the exact spot he had stopped.
“It feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years,” he said on arrival.
Twenty-eight years in eleven steps
- 1 November 1998: sets off from Punta Arenas, Chile, with about $500 and no sponsor, planning 36,000 miles (58,000 km) in 12 years.
- 2001: crosses the roughly 200 km Darién Gap, then spends 18 days in a Panamanian jail for entering a restricted zone without a visa.
- May 2002: reaches the US border at Nogales; two years later he is in Fairbanks, Alaska.
- 17 March 2006: starts across the frozen Bering Strait with Dimitri Kieffer, a zigzag of about 150 miles over some 14 days, and is detained near Uelen, Russia.
- 2008 onward: the financial crisis wipes out sponsorship and stalls the Siberian leg.
- 2012 to 2014: walks about 5,600 km across the United States to the Russian Embassy in Washington in protest; Russia later grants a visa.
- 8 August 2017: reaches Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; in 2018 he is escorted out of Xinjiang, China.
- 2019 to 2023: sanctions, politics and COVID-19 shut the routes through Iran, Russia and Turkmenistan.
- 2024: swims about 288 km across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan over 31 days.
- 25 April 2025: reaches Istanbul after more than 2,000 km on foot from Baku; Budapest follows that November.
- 2026: Europe’s 90-days-in-180 visa limit forces repeated trips to Mexico before he reaches Belgium in June and the English coast in October.
The numbers behind “28 years”
His team and the reports from Dover put the total at close to 50,000 km, or about 31,000 miles, through 29 countries. From the start date to the Dover landing is 10,200 days, or 27.9 years. Dividing one by the other gives an average of about 1,790 km (1,110 miles) a year, or just under 5 km a day.
That average hides how he actually moves. Bushby has said his daily distance on walking days fell from about 30 km earlier in the trip to 20 to 25 km. At 25 km a day, 50,000 km takes about 2,000 walking days, which is around five and a half years. In other words, by Badiyaa’s estimate, roughly four-fifths of the 28 years went on waiting: for visas, sponsors, court rulings, borders to reopen and seasons to turn. His original plan, 36,000 miles in 12 years, assumed 3,000 miles a year; he has managed a little over a third of that pace.
The last 400 km
At his recent pace of 20 to 25 km a day, the walk from Kent to East Yorkshire needs about 16 to 20 walking days, which fits the early-November target. Werner Herzog is filming the journey for a feature called Walk of Life. Earlier this year, waiting out a visa in Mexico, Bushby admitted he was torn about the ending: “This thing needs wrapping up. But I have mixed feelings.” On the beach, he named the next challenge plainly: “I’ve got to try and get established in the grown-up world again.”
Further reading
Image: Ridiculopathy, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
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