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After 28 years on the road, Karl Bushby is just days away from finishing one of the longest journeys ever made on foot. The 57-year-old former British paratrooper, who set out from the southern tip of Chile in 1998, is now walking the final stretch to his hometown of Hull, in northeast England, after crossing four continents and 29 countries.
Earlier this month, Bushby swam across the English Channel and set foot in the U.K. for the first time since he began his expedition. When he left the army at 29, he expected the trip to take about 12 years.
Instead, financial crises, visa bans, a pandemic, and closed borders turned it into a journey of nearly three decades.
Why and how did Bushby’s trip begin?
Bushby set out from Punta Arenas, Chile, the southernmost city in South America, which sits at the same latitude south as his hometown of Hull, England, does north.
His rules were simple: he could not use transportation to move forward, and he could not go home until he arrived on foot.
The idea came from a birthday card gifted from his father, which described two British special forces soldiers arguing over whether someone could walk from London to New York through the Bering Strait. Bushby decided to try and to go even farther. He called his journey “The Goliath Expedition.”
But Bushby was not alone. He travelled with a custom golf cart he calls “the Beast,” which carried his survival gear and food.
The hardest challenges he had to face on his trip
Between 2000 and 2001, he crossed the Darién Gap, between Panama and Colombia, at a time of conflict between guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug cartels. In 2006, he spent 14 days crossing the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia. “Polar bear dream, but a human nightmare,” he told NPR.
He also lost sponsors during the 2008 financial crisis, was denied a visa by Russia in 2012 and, in 2024, swam the Caspian Sea after other routes into Europe were closed. “You can’t account for financial crises, pandemics, visa bans, wars, and the bureaucracy you have to deal with,” he told The Guardian.
The final stretch before arriving home after 28 years
In early October, after being denied permission to walk through the Channel Tunnel, Bushby swam the English Channel for about 20 hours over three days and arrived near Dover. Soon after, he had his first fish and chips in 28 years.
Now he is walking the last stretch to his mother’s home near Hull, where he hopes to arrive on November 1, the same date he set out in 1998. “I’d like to drag it out longer if I could,” he said.
Bushby has seen his mother and son only a few times in nearly three decades, and he has a granddaughter he has never met. “There are people that you care for the most in the world that pay a price for your antics and for your ambitions,” he concluded.