After nearly three decades on the road, British adventurer Karl Bushby has finally walked back into his hometown of Hull, completing a 50,000-kilometre journey that began in Chile and crossed four continents without the aid of any form of transport. The former paratrooper was greeted on Monday by a crowd of up to 1,000 well-wishers in the city centre, where he thanked the many people who had supported him along the way.
“I didn't do this alone,” Bushby told the crowd, describing the expedition as a “global effort.” Hull’s mayor, Maria Coward, praised his achievement, and Bushby acknowledged the collective nature of his success: “You wouldn't believe just how many people have been involved in this, to get us around the kinds of obstacles that we face. We've faced down governments, we've faced down some of the hardest challenges.”
The final leg of his journey was marked by a symbolic crossing of the Humber Bridge on Sunday, shrouded in thick mist, before he made his way to the city centre and ultimately to his mother’s home. The trek, which Bushby has named the “Goliath Expedition,” was originally expected to take 12 years, but a combination of swampy jungle, scorching desert, frozen tundra, and, above all, mountains of bureaucratic red tape stretched it to 28.
From a birthday card to a global odyssey
Bushby’s extraordinary mission was sparked in the mid-1990s by a birthday card from his father, Keith, an Army veteran. The card mentioned a debate among special forces troops about the feasibility of walking from London to New York via the Bering land bridge, a route believed by some scientists to have been used by early humans migrating from Asia to the Americas. Bushby drew a continuous line on a map across Europe and Asia, then down through North and South America to the tip of Chile. “And that was it,” he recalled. “With that under my skin, there was no going back.”
His rules were simple: no transport to move forward, and he had to return home on foot. He set out with just $500 and soon faced hurricane-force winds on the Patagonian Steppe. In 2001, he navigated the dangerous Darién Gap, a roadless expanse of jungle and mountains between South and Central America, dodging conflict, and was later jailed for 18 days in Panama for crossing a restricted border zone. In 2006, during a 56-mile crossing of the Bering Strait with American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer, he nearly drowned in freezing waters and lost most of their supplies. After making the rare crossing, both were jailed and faced deportation for entering Russia illegally.
Visa problems and the COVID-19 pandemic stretched the expedition even further. It took nearly a decade to get through Russia, where weather allowed travel only a few months each year. When Russia denied him a visa in 2012, Bushby walked in protest from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., which eventually led to the necessary paperwork. He was trailed by police in China, and when geopolitical tensions closed off Russia and Iran, he swam 31 days across the Caspian Sea using a technique he calls “floatimming,” a hybrid of floating and swimming. Europe presented its own hurdles, with 90-day visa limits forcing him to travel in three-month chunks. He swam across the English Channel in early October to reach the UK again.
Throughout his journey, Bushby relied on a shifting group of sponsors, but for the past 16 years, his main support has come from a production company founded by “House of Cards” creator Beau Willimon and music producer Jordan Tappis, who are backing a documentary by filmmaker Werner Herzog. Yet it was the kindness of strangers that truly sustained him. He was welcomed into shacks assembled from car parts, nursed back to health by a Peruvian doctor’s family, and fed countless meals of rice and water by people seeking nothing in return. “I’ve been welcomed in by the poorest of the poor,” he said. “I’ve met 99.9999% of the very best of humanity. Every culture, every country has been the same response.”
As he settles back into life in Britain, Bushby faces a new kind of challenge: reintegration. “I've got to try and get established in the grown-up world again,” he admitted. His homecoming was captured by Herzog’s film crew for the documentary “Walk of Life.” Bushby was reunited with his mother Angela, his 36-year-old son Adam, and a 12-year-old granddaughter he had never met. Hull’s mayor summed up the city’s pride: “So many people have followed Karl on his epic journey. We have all felt inspired by his spirit, tenacity and dogged determination.”
