The first thing Angela Bushby said to her son after 28 years was a question: “Where have you been?” Karl Bushby, 57, had just walked up to the Hull row house he left in 1998, under a banner reading “Welcome Home Son,” and wrapped his crying mother in a hug on Monday, November 2.
The answer was almost everywhere. The former British Army paratrooper had set off on foot from Punta Arenas, at the bottom of Chile, on November 1, 1998, and refused every engine, boat and plane on the way back to northern England. His tally: about 31,000 miles (50,000 km), four continents and 30 countries.
“Behave yourself, mother,” he teased as she held on. “Get yourself together.”
Earlier that morning, hundreds of people packed the square by Hull’s City Hall to cheer him in. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he told them. Then he pushed his handcart, known as The Beast, the last few streets home with a spare tire strapped on top that he will never need.
We covered his arrival in Dover a month ago, when Hull was still about 250 miles away. Now the line on the map is closed.
From a birthday card to a 28-year odyssey
The plan began with a card from his father, Keith, an Army veteran, in the mid-1990s. It mentioned two special forces soldiers arguing over whether someone could walk from London to New York by way of the Bering land bridge. Bushby sketched the idea on a world map, then made it longer by starting in South America.
He thought it could be done in roughly five years, then revised that to “12 years plus.” His verdict on Monday: “never in our wildest dreams would we ever have imagined 28 years.”
The route, year by year
- 1998: leaves Hull in October; starts walking north from Punta Arenas on November 1.
- 2001: crosses the Darién Gap into Panama, then spends 18 days in jail there for entering without a visa.
- 2006: crosses the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia with Dimitri Kieffer in March, after more than 17,000 miles through the Americas, and is detained by Russian border officers.
- 2008 to 2010: stuck in Mexico after sponsors drop away in the financial crisis.
- 2013: banned from Russia for five years, he walks more than 3,000 miles from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest.
- 2017 to 2019: Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, until visas and the COVID-19 pandemic halt him at the Turkmenistan–Iran border.
- 2024: swims 179 miles across the Caspian Sea in 31 days to avoid Iran and Russia.
- 2025 to 2026: Turkey, the Balkans and central Europe, with trips back to Mexico while his Schengen days reset; the Channel Tunnel refuses him, so he swims the English Channel and lands near Dover on October 5, 2026.
- 2026: reaches his mother’s gate in Hull on November 2.
The math behind 28 years
From the first step in Chile to the hug in Hull is 10,228 days. Spread 31,000 miles across all of them and you get an average of about 3 miles a day, slower than a gentle stroll to the shops. That figure is misleading, though. Bushby has said he spent only about 15 of the 28 years actually walking, with the rest lost to visas, sponsorship and waiting. Over roughly 5,480 walking days, 31,000 miles works out to about 5.7 miles a day, every day, with a loaded cart, through tundra, desert and jungle.
The calendar overrun is just as stark. A trip first sketched as a five-year project took about 5.6 times as long. He left at 29 and came back at 57, and in that time he met his 12-year-old granddaughter for the first time, while his son, Adam, is now 36.
“Half of it is literally dealing with these bureaucratic geopolitical problems, not just the environmental hurdles,” he has said of the journey. “There are some times where the solution is just to wait.”
What he owes, and what comes next
Bushby credited strangers, governments and everyone in between. “They say it takes a village but literally it took a world to get me here,” he said. “I didn’t do this alone. There was a big team. The biggest team. Earth.”
He has also been candid that the finish frightens him a little. He compared it to stepping across the event horizon of a black hole, and he is moving into his mother’s basement for now. His plan for the comedown is simple: find “another mission, another passion and get busy.”
The diary is already filling. Six speaking engagements are booked over the next two months, a sequel to his 2005 memoir, Giant Steps, is on the way, and filmmaker Werner Herzog, who met him on the beach at Dover, is making a documentary about the trek.
Further reading
Image: Hullian111, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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