After 28 years, British adventurer Karl Bushby has arrived back home after a 50,000-kilometre trek from Chile across four continents without using any transport to progress.
He was met on Monday in the centre of Hull, in northeast England, by a crowd of up to 1,000 cheering people, and thanked everyone for all the support he had met along the way.
“I didn’t do this alone,” he said, adding it was a “global effort” after winning praise from Hull Mayor Maria Coward.
“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.”
He had already been applauded on Sunday as he crossed the iconic Humber Bridge near Hull in thick mist, ahead of his final push into the city centre and then on to his mother’s home.
Swampy jungle, scorching desert and frozen tundra slowed him down, but mountains of red tape helped turn what was supposed to be a 12-year trek into the epic he has dubbed the “Goliath Expedition”.
How did Karl Bushby’s journey begin?
The former British paratrooper’s mission was sparked by a birthday card from his father, Keith, in the mid-90s. Keith, an Army veteran himself, mentioned an argument special forces troops once had about the possibility of walking from London to New York over the Bering land bridge believed by some scientists to have been used by early humans to migrate from Asia to the Americas at a time of lower sea levels.
Bushby drew a continuous line on a map across Europe and Asia to North America and – instead of going to New York – carried on straight down to the tip of Chile.
“And that was it,” he said. “With that under my skin, there was no going back.”
Explorers have long circled the planet by boat, plane, balloon, bicycle and even on foot. But most walkers have relied on transport to cross oceans.
Bushby imposed two strict rules for his journey: transportation could not be used to move forward and he had to return home on foot.
He set out with $500 and soon found himself fighting hurricane-force winds on the Patagonian Steppe. He dodged war in the dangerous Darién Gap, the roadless and rugged jungle, rainforest and mountains between South and Central America, in 2001 and was then jailed for 18 days after crossing a restricted border zone in Panama.
After being airlifted to safety during the 56-mile Bering Strait crossing in 2006 with American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer, he had a near-death plunge into freezing waters and they nearly lost all their supplies. After managing the rare crossing, they were jailed and faced deportation for entering Russia illegally.
Visa problems and the pandemic stretched the expedition to 28 years
It took almost 10 years to get through Russia because of visa issues and weather that only allowed travel a few months a 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 him getting the proper paperwork.
With each setback, he would retreat to the US or Mexico, where living was much cheaper, and wait for his next chance to return to the point where he left off.
He was trailed by police through China, had a lengthy setback from the pandemic and was forced to swim 31 days across the Caspian Sea because geopolitical problems had closed off Russia and Iran. He is not a good swimmer and relied on a flotation vest and wetsuit as he plodded backward by flapping his arms in a technique he calls “floatimming”, a hybrid of floating and swimming.
Europe presented its own challenges, with 90-day limits on visits that forced him to travel in three-month chunks.
He swam across the English Channel in early October to reach the UK again.
“Feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years,” he said later in a statement, adding his journey “hadn’t been easy”.
The kindness of strangers helped him keep going
He has been helped by a shifting group of sponsors that have come and gone as the trip dragged on and fortunes tumbled in the 2008 financial crisis. For the past 16 years, he has relied mainly on a production company founded by “House of Cards” creator Beau Willimon and music producer Jordan Tappis, who are backing a documentary in the works by filmmaker Werner Herzog.
It has been the kindness of countless strangers, though, that has buoyed and propelled him throughout, particularly from those who have the least to offer.
He’s been welcomed into shacks assembled from car parts, nursed back to health from a bad stomach infection by a Peruvian doctor’s family, and fed countless meals of just 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.”
Returning home brings a different challenge
“So many people have followed Karl on his epic journey. We have all felt inspired by his spirit, tenacity and dogged determination,” Coward said earlier, adding the city took “pride in his incredible achievement”.
Bushby was to be reunited late on Monday with his mother Angela, his 36-year-old son Adam and a 12-year-old granddaughter he has never met.
Legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog and a film crew are accompanying Bushby on his homecoming. Herzog is making a feature-length documentary about the journey entitled “Walk of Life”.
In an interview with AFP from northern France in September, Bushby voiced some apprehension about returning to a more normal life back in Britain.
“I’ve got to try and get established in the grown-up world again,” he said.