Karl Bushby set off from Punta Arenas, Chile, on November 1, 1998, as a 29-year-old former paratrooper with a vow: he would not return to the United Kingdom until he had completed the journey entirely on foot, without using transport to advance. On Monday, 28 years later, the 57-year-old finally kept that promise, arriving in Hull, England, and walking the final stretch to his mother's house.
Bushby's trek took him across four continents, and he reported covering 31,000 miles, or 50,000 kilometers, according to BBC. The Guardian, however, put the total distance closer to 36,000 miles across 29 countries, citing figures from Bushby's own account of the expedition in a report from The Guardian. A separate Guardian feature similarly described the journey as spanning approximately 36,000 miles, or 58,000 kilometers. The discrepancy between sources has never been resolved, but the scale of the undertaking is not in dispute either way.
Bushby arrived in Queen Victoria Square in Hull's city centre at 11 a.m. Monday before heading to his mother's home in Newtondale, according to the Hull Daily Mail. Waiting for him was his mother, who according to BBC had not seen her son in a decade. He also reunited with his 36-year-old son and met his 12-year-old granddaughter for the first time, the Guardian reported.
A Frozen Strait, a Panamanian Jail Cell, and a War Zone
The hardest stretches of Bushby's route read like a survival thriller. In March 2006, he linked up with French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer to cross the Bering Strait, spending 14 days walking across shifting plates of ice in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius, per the same BBC account. Floating ice eventually carried the pair 30 kilometers out to sea, forcing a helicopter rescue, according to Bushby's own expedition website, karlbushby.world.
The crossing also brought legal trouble. Russian border troops detained Bushby and Kieffer after they entered the country outside an official port, and a court in Lavrentiya fined them $72 and ordered them deported for failing to obtain passport stamps, according to a contemporaneous report from NBC News. A Russian appeals court later cleared Bushby to continue the expedition, the expedition's website states.
Years earlier, Bushby had crossed the Darién Gap, the dense and lawless jungle border region between South and Central America. His own account of the expedition says he spent 18 days in a Panamanian jail after crossing a restricted border zone during an active conflict without a visa, per karlbushby.world.
Avoiding Iran and Swimming to Britain
Visa restrictions and geopolitics repeatedly forced Bushby to improvise. In 2024, he swam 186 miles across the Caspian Sea to reach Azerbaijan rather than re-enter Russia or cross Iran, according to a BBC profile of the expedition. Years of struggling through Russia amid visa complications and weather that limited travel to only a few months a year had already stretched the timeline far beyond what he expected.
The final obstacle was the English Channel itself. Eurotunnel officials declined Bushby's request to use a service tunnel to enter the UK, according to BBC, so he swam instead. He reached British soil at Shakespeare Beach near Dover on October 5, after swimming the English Channel, according to karlbushby.world. A separate Guardian feature on the expedition reported that the 21-mile crossing took him 20 hours spread across three days, swimming on his back, with his heavily loaded travel trolley, nicknamed Beast 2, following along.
From a Birthday Card to a Pledge That Took Nearly Three Decades
Bushby originally estimated the journey might take around five years, and even his more realistic expectations topped out at roughly 12 years or more — he said he never imagined it would stretch to 28. BBC reported that only about 15 of those 28 years were actually spent walking, with the rest consumed by visa delays, financial crises, the COVID-19 pandemic and bureaucratic holdups. The Guardian's October feature quoted Bushby attributing the long timeline directly to his refusal to bend the rules: “It took 28 years because of the rules and because we refused to compromise on the route.”
Now home, Bushby told BBC he is finished with long-distance adventuring: “I'm hanging my boots up.” He said he was unsure what would come next in his life, though he credited the kindness of strangers and of entire nations for helping him finally make it back. The Guardian described his welcome in Hull as a hero's reception and noted the achievement would make him, by that outlet's account, the first person to have walked continuously across the world — a distinction not independently verified elsewhere in the available reporting.
