Karl Bushby is home. The former British paratrooper reached his mother’s house in Hull, northern England, on Monday, ending a walk that began at the southern tip of South America on Nov. 1, 1998, the Associated Press reported via NBC News.
He was 29 when he set out and is 57 now. Along the way he covered roughly 30,000 miles on foot across four continents, and he swam the rest.
The trip took 28 years and one day, CBS News reported. He had planned on about five.
A birthday card started the Goliath Expedition
The idea came from his father. In the mid-1990s Keith Bushby, an army veteran, sent his son a birthday card, the AP reported. It mentioned special forces troops debating a walk from London to New York over the Bering land bridge.
Bushby called the project the Goliath Expedition and set himself two rules, according to CBS. He would use no machines to move the journey forward. And he would not go home until it was finished, even if family or friends died.
The first rule had an odd start. He walked to a Royal Air Force base near Oxford and then flew to South America, the AP said. The walk itself started at Punta Arenas, Chile.
Where water blocked the way, he swam instead of taking a boat. That is how he crossed the Caspian Sea and the English Channel.
The route ran through the US and over Bering Strait ice
From Chile he walked north through South and Central America. In 2001 he crossed the Darién Gap, the roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama. Panama then jailed him for 18 days for crossing a restricted border zone, the AP said. CBS says armed gangs were among the threats in the Darién.
He continued through Central America, the United States and Canada, according to CBS. Then came the stretch that made his name.
In March 2006, Bushby and Dimitry Kieffer of Anchorage, Alaska, walked across a frozen 56-mile stretch of the Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia’s Chukotka region. The crossing took 15 days, the AP reported at the time in a 2006 story carried by NBC News.
It nearly went wrong several times. The pair faced a polar bear standoff and plunged into freezing water, the AP said on Monday. They almost lost their supplies when their sleds slid into the sea. At one point they were airlifted to safety, then restarted.
Russia’s welcome was cold in a different way. Border guards detained the two men because they had not entered at an official crossing. The FSB security service said they faced accusations of illegal border crossing, according to the 2006 AP report. They spent weeks fighting a deportation order before Bushby could continue, Alaska’s KUAC radio reported that June.
Russia cost him nearly a decade
Russia turned into the longest delay of the trip. Visa problems and a climate that allowed travel only a few months a year kept his progress slow there for nearly 10 years, the AP said.
In April 2012 Russia denied him a visa, Fox News reported. His answer was to keep walking, in the opposite direction. He walked from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest. The AP says that eventually got him the paperwork he needed.
Other setbacks had nothing to do with Russia. Fox lists the 2008 financial crash and the COVID-19 pandemic among the causes of long pauses. CBS adds illness and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During some breaks he lived in Mexico, AFP reported via Gulf News.
The rules bent at least once. ExplorersWeb reported in 2024 that he broke his no-transport rule by flying to Los Angeles during the pandemic.
Two long swims got him around closed borders
After Russia his route ran through Mongolia and China into Central Asia, according to Fox. There he hit another wall.
He could not get a visa for Iran, his next country, so he swam across the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan in 2024, ExplorersWeb reported. The crossing covered 288 kilometers, about 179 miles, over 32 days at sea, 27 of them spent swimming.
He swam alongside Angela Maxwell, three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon, and slept aboard the support boats. CBS says the swim also let him avoid the war in Ukraine. Bushby told well-wishers on Monday that “we’ve had to create two world records just to get back here.”
He then walked across Europe. On Oct. 5 he swam the English Channel from France and landed on Shakespeare Beach, just south of Dover, with permission from British and French authorities, AFP reported.
Filmmaker Werner Herzog and his crew were on the beach. They are making a feature-length documentary about the walk called “Walk of Life,” according to AFP.
“Feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years,” Bushby said in a statement afterward.
The numbers show how much of the trip was waiting
The totals depend on who is counting. The AP puts the distance at about 31,000 miles across 30 countries. CBS says about 30,000 miles and some 75 million steps, and AFP counts 29 countries.
Our own arithmetic puts the scale in perspective. From Nov. 1, 1998, to Monday is 10,228 days, which matches CBS’s “more than 10,000 days” away.
Spread across that span, 30,000 miles works out to under 3 miles a day. Any regular walker covers that in an hour. The gap between that average and a normal day on the road is the waiting. Visas, winters and permits ate years of the trip.
It is also why endurance feats like a record-breaking backyard ultra measure something different. Bushby’s challenge was less about speed than about outlasting borders. For most people, getting between continents takes a plane; at Iceland’s Silfra fissure, divers can reach across the gap between two tectonic plates.
Hull turned out for the final 3 miles
The last stage began in Dover on Oct. 9. Bushby walked north for about 250 miles pushing a two-wheeled cart, according to the AP and Fox.
Hull City Council invited residents to welcome him in Queen Victoria Square on Monday morning, after a planned crossing of the Humber Bridge. Lord Mayor Maria Coward was set to greet him on a stage outside City Hall, the council said in a notice on Oct. 26.
“We also know what it’s like to come home to Hull,” Coward said in the notice. She described the moment “your car or train, or feet in Karl’s case,” crosses the Humber Bridge.
From there he walked roughly 3 miles to a residential neighborhood north of the city, with children cheering and an honor guard in front, CBS reported. He pushed a cart he had carried for about 25 years for the final steps.
His mother, Angela, greeted him outside her home, CBS said. The AP said he had not seen her in a decade, and a crowd held a banner reading “Welcome Home Son.”
“They say it takes a village but literally it took a world to get me here,” Bushby told the crowd. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
He arrives home with plans to rebuild
The homecoming is also a restart. Bushby planned to see his son, Adam, whom he met only a few times during the trip, the AP reported. He was also due to meet his 12-year-old granddaughter for the first time.
He has been candid about money. “I’ve got to try and get established in the grown-up world again, because I’m going to arrive home with nothing,” he told AFP in September.
The next public chapter is Herzog’s “Walk of Life,” whose production company has backed the trek for 16 years, according to AFP. AFP did not report a release date.