After 28 Years on Foot, Karl Bushby Is a Few Miles From Home

After 28 Years on Foot, Karl Bushby Is a Few Miles From Home

A send-off in Patagonia, 1998

On 1 November 1998, Karl Bushby, then 28, a former British paratrooper, set out from Punta Arenas in Chile with two self-imposed rules: use no transport to make forward progress, and do not set foot in Britain again until the job is done. He is now 57, and half his life has passed on the trail.

Hull is rolling out the welcome

The finish line is civic, not private. Hull's council has invited residents to gather in Queen Victoria Square from 10am on Monday 2 November for his arrival at about 11am, where the Lord Mayor, Maria Coward, and the Hull Volunteers will greet him. From there he walks the last stretch to his mother's house in the east of the city.

Through the jungle, at gunpoint

Bushby walked the length of South America and hacked through the Darien Gap, the roughly 200-mile roadless jungle between Panama and Colombia. At the time it was a war zone contested by the Colombian state, FARC guerrillas, paramilitaries and cocaine cartels. He was held at gunpoint there and came out alive.

Across the ice to Russia

In March 2006 he and French-American adventurer Dimitri Kieffer crossed the Bering Strait on foot from Alaska, over shifting sea ice, swimming where the ice gave way. It stands as the first recorded east-to-west crossing of the strait on foot in modern times. The pair were detained by the Russian authorities for failing to register and held for nearly two months.

31 days floating across the Caspian

With Russia and Iran closed to him by geopolitical conflict, Bushby chose to swim the Caspian Sea, the world's largest inland body of water. A self-confessed poor swimmer, he wore a wetsuit and flotation vest and moved backwards by flapping his arms, a hybrid he calls "floatimming." In 2024 he completed the 31-day crossing alongside American long-distance walker Angela Maxwell and two young Azerbaijani champion swimmers.

The Channel, the hard way

Denied access to the Channel Tunnel's service tunnel in June, he swam instead: 20 hours in the water over three days, 21 miles on his back with fins, hand paddles and neck flotation, landing at Shakespeare Beach near Dover on 5 October. It was his first time on British soil in 28 years. From Dover he has been walking the roughly 250 miles north to Hull.

Only 15 years of actual walking

Bushby reckons only about 15 of the 28 years were spent moving. The rest went on visas and geopolitics, with long retreats to Mexico, where living costs are low, plus a lengthy pandemic standstill. By the latest counts he has passed through 29 countries and covered some 36,000 miles.

It started with a birthday card

The spark for what he calls the Goliath Expedition was a birthday card from his father, recounting two British special-forces men arguing over whether anyone could walk from London to New York via the Bering Strait. Bushby decided to try it, and to go further. Hull is marking the feat with a free exhibition of his photographs, diary extracts, letters home and "The Beast," the custom trolley that carried his kit.

What fills the space after a life's goal ends

Bushby admits the approaching finish frightens him in a way the jungle never did, saying his purpose for living is about to end abruptly. What should a person do the week after a decades-long goal is done? Share your view below.