Twenty-eight years. Four continents. Zero rides.
Karl Bushby finally made it back to his mother’s doorstep Monday.
The former British paratrooper, now 57, threw his arms around his tearful mom, Angela, on the pavement outside her modest row house in Hull, the same northern England home he strolled away from in 1998. A “Welcome Home Son” banner hung over the scene as reporters, gawkers and a documentary crew jammed the street.
“They say it takes a village but literally it took a world to get me here,” Bushby told the crowd. “The kindness of strangers, so many, from individuals to nation states to get me back here today. I didn’t do this alone. There was a big team. The biggest team. Earth.”
Karl Bushby, a 57-year-old former British paratrooper, finished his epic walk around the globe Monday when he reached his mother’s row house in Hull, England, the home he left in 1998. Getty Images
Naturally, he finished on foot. He hiked across the Humber Bridge into his hometown.
Crossing the Humber Bridge into East Yorkshire on Sunday, he was greeted by his father, his brothers, his 36-year-old son Adam, and his 12-year-old granddaughter, whom he was meeting for the very first time, the BBC reported.
On Monday, he pulled into Queen Victoria Square in central Hull around 11 a.m., where hundreds packed a civic ceremony to greet him.
The trek covered roughly 31,000 miles, four continents and 30 countries, and he never once let a vehicle carry him forward. Getty Images
“I’m back,” he said. “This is absolute madness.”
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he cracked. “Is that it, is it done?”
The whole saga traces back to a card from his dad. In the mid-1990s, Keith Bushby, himself an Army veteran, passed along a debate raging among his special forces pals over whether a man could hoof it from London to New York by way of the Bering land bridge, the ancient crossing some scientists believe early humans used to reach the Americas when seas ran lower.
Bushby, who logged 12 years with the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, quit the Army in late 1997 fresh off an ugly divorce and spoiling for a challenge.
“I had something to prove to my paratrooper mates,” he told Backpacker magazine.
On the final approach, Bushby reunited with his son, Adam, and his father, Keith, as he crossed the Humber Bridge into his hometown. Getty Images
He then embraced his emotional mother, Angela, outside her house as a crowd of reporters, well-wishers and a documentary crew looked on beneath a “Welcome Home Son” banner. Getty Images
He set two unbreakable rules. No vehicle could ever carry him forward, and he couldn’t go home until his own feet got him there.
At 29, he hopped a flight from a Royal Air Force base outside Oxford to the bottom of South America and started walking from Punta Arenas, Chile, on Nov. 1, 1998, reportedly carrying less than $1,000.
He pegged the trip at roughly five years. Fat chance.
“You just dump a whole bucket full of reality on that,” he said. “We suspected that it was 12 years plus. And the plus was a big plus. But never in our wildest dreams would we ever have imagined 28 years.”
The journey began on Nov. 1, 1998, in Punta Arenas, Chile, after a birthday card from his father sparked the idea of walking from London to New York over the Bering land bridge. Courtesy of Karl Bushby
Mother Nature threw everything she had at him. In 2001 he slipped past armed conflict in the Darién Gap, the brutal, road-free stretch of jungle and mountains linking the Americas, only to land behind bars in Panama for 18 days after wandering into a restricted border zone.
In 2006, he and American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer tackled the 56-mile frozen Bering Strait. They had to be rescued by air, regrouped, then went toe-to-toe with a polar bear, nearly drowned in frigid water and almost watched their sleds and supplies vanish into the sea. Their reward for pulling it off was an arrest in Russia for illegal entry and the threat of deportation.
But paperwork, not peril, proved his toughest foe. Russia ate up nearly a decade as visa headaches piled up and the weather allowed only a few months of walking a year. When Moscow refused him a visa in 2012, he marched from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington in protest, which eventually got him the documents. The Kremlin later hit him with a five-year entry ban in 2013, forcing a detour through Mongolia and China, a weekslong swim across the Caspian Sea to Baku and, finally, a push into Europe last year.
Bushby originally figured the trip would take about five years, but jungles, deserts, frozen seas and endless visa battles stretched it to 28. Courtesy of Karl Bushby
Bushby survived the lawless Darién Gap, spent 18 days in a Panamanian jail, battled shifting ice across the Bering Strait and spent nearly a decade fighting Russian bureaucracy before rerouting through Mongolia and China. Courtesy of Karl Bushby
The last hurdle was water. The Channel Tunnel’s operator nixed his request to walk its service passage, so the self-described weak swimmer, who once said he paddles “like a cat dropped in a bathtub,” dove in. On Oct. 5 he staggered onto Shakespeare Beach, south of Dover, after about 20 hours of swimming spread over three days, with his father and brothers waiting on the sand. He’d quietly cleared the crossing with French and British officials and both coast guards beforehand.
“It feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years,” he told The Post. “It hasn’t been easy, and that’s part of the point.”
His roughest stretches? “Lots of different hard parts, but let’s say the Darien Gap and Alaska,” he said. His favorite scenery was in South America, especially Colombia, Chile and the parched Atacama Desert.
“It’s kept me in shape,” he said. “There are some aches and pains, but anyone who’s gonna be 57 and above, and is physically active, is probably gonna be the same.”
Bushby told The Post has no regrets. “It worked, so no, I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.
He swam the Caspian Sea and later the English Channel, landing near Dover on Oct. 5 after about 20 hours in the water over three days. India Whiskey Photographic
Karl Bushby pictured with his young son Adam prior to leaving for 28 years to walk around the globe. Courtesy of Karl Bushby
The real reckoning happens off the road.
When Bushby left, his son Adam was 8. Adam now lives in Belfast and has a family of his own. He told the Yorkshire Post that his father’s return “doesn’t seem real.”
“[I am] looking forward to reconnecting with everyone. There’s distance between us, and we need to patch that up, and move on,” Bushby told The Post a few weeks before he completed his journey.
Angela, who hadn’t laid eyes on her son in a decade, kept his globe-trotting saga in scrapbooks at the Sutton Park house. He’s expected to move back in with her .
“Karl has always been headstrong,” she told the BBC.
“It’s been a week of lasts,” Bushby told the crowd. “The last day in the tent. The last day on the road. After 28 years you couldn’t ask for more than this. This is the last of the last few steps almost to my mother’s house.”
Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog is directing a feature documentary about the odyssey called “Walk of Life,” and Bushby plans to focus on the film and public speaking next. Getty Images
“They say it takes a village but literally it took a world to get me here,” Bushby said to the crowd at his homecoming. Tom Maddick / SWNS
Hollywood is along for the final stretch. Famed director Werner Herzog met him in Dover and is making a feature documentary, “Walk of Life,” for Westward Productions, the company launched by “House of Cards” creator Beau Willimon and Jordan Tappis, with Skellig Rock and The Roots also producing. Westward has backed the trek for 16 years and holds his archive of footage.
Now Bushby faces the one thing he never trained for, standing still.
“We need to find another mission, another passion and get busy. That’s the solution, I believe,” he said, adding he plans to pour himself into the film and the speaking circuit.
After three decades of strangers feeding and sheltering him, his takeaway is simple.
“People are amazing, despite what we think the world looks like,” he said. “Humanity is worth the effort.”
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