British Adventurer Karl Bushby Finally Returns Home

When Karl Bushby began walking home from the southernmost tip of South America, his son Adam was just eight. Bushby expected the extraordinary journey to be over within 12 years.

But the former paratrooper’s expedition stretched across almost half his lifetime. It took him through jungle war zones, over frozen seas and into repeated disputes with border officials, while the young son he left behind grew up and became a father of his own.

Now 57, Bushby is finally preparing to reach his mother’s front gate in Hull after 28 years and an estimated 75 million steps. His arrival will bring an end to the epic journey and a long-awaited reunion with the family who have watched and waited for him.

Among those waiting is his 12-year-old granddaughter, whom he has spoken to on video calls but never met face to face. Adam, now 36, has visited his father only four times during the expedition.

Adam has always felt pride in what his father achieved, but that pride was accompanied by the hardship of growing up without him. “There were parts of my life where you just need your dad for it,” he told the Yorkshire Post.

Bushby’s return marks the conclusion of a trek that began in the 20th century, long before smartphones and social media made it easier for travellers to remain connected with loved ones at home.

A line first traced across a map evolved into the Goliath Expedition, a challenge complicated by the 2008 financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic and shifting geopolitical tensions that repeatedly blocked his route.

At around 11am, Bushby was welcomed to Hull’s Queen Victoria Square. Lord Mayor Councillor Maria Coward greeted him outside City Hall before he attended a short private reception.

He then travelled to his mother’s house, completing the final miles of a journey whose destination never changed, despite the transformation of the world around him.

The idea began taking shape when Bushby was still serving as a soldier. His father, Keith, had sent him a birthday card describing a debate over whether it was possible to walk from London to New York by crossing the Bering Strait.

Bushby studied a map on the wall and plotted a route through Europe and Asia, across to Alaska and down through the Americas. He then expanded the challenge to begin at the southern tip of South America.

By October 1998, he had left Hull and travelled through the Falkland Islands to Punta Arenas in Chile. On November 1, he began walking north with roughly £500 and a trailer loaded with his supplies.

The rules were straightforward, even if following them was not: Bushby could not use transport to make progress along his planned route, and he would not return home until he could complete the journey under his own power.

His initial estimates indicated that the expedition would last 12 years. Friends and relatives, however, thought he might abandon the plan after a few weeks and come home.

Even his equipment seemed to offer an early warning about what lay ahead, with the trailer he called ‘The Beast’ breaking down on the first day.

The determination that kept him moving had been forged against a childhood in which he often felt he was failing.

Born into a military family, Bushby struggled at school with dyslexia, which was diagnosed when he was 13, and left at 16 without qualifications before joining the Junior Parachute Company.

His father had served in the SAS and his younger brother Adrian also pursued a military career, but Bushby’s own entry into Army life was far from straightforward. It took him five attempts to pass the training before he was accepted.

He later married a woman from Northern Ireland, also named Angela, with whom he had Adam, although the marriage ended before the expedition and his former wife and son returned to Belfast.

For Adam, his father’s departure began a childhood shaped by an adventure so unusual that other children sometimes refused to believe his explanations of where his dad had gone.

A reunion in Alaska in 2004, when he was 14, helped him understand that Bushby would not be returning until he had finished what he had started.

Over the years, letters gave way to phone calls and video conversations, allowing father and son to remain in contact even as the milestones accumulated at home.

Bushby missed school years, birthdays, Christmases and the birth of his granddaughter, while Adam grew accustomed to sharing news without knowing how quickly a reply might come.

Bushby has acknowledged that those closest to him paid a price for his ambitions, saying that the burden of separation becomes more difficult to carry as the years pass: ‘It gets heavier over time,’ he said, warning would-be adventurers that journeys lasting longer than five years could profoundly affect their families and relationships.

His advice to others was to go and have their adventure, but keep it within a reasonable timescale – a limit his own expedition had long since exceeded as he continued trying to find a way home.

Back in Hull, his mother Angela followed his progress through newspaper cuttings collected in scrapbooks, enduring the long silences and alarming reports familiar to the families of those who venture into dangerous places.

Last December, she said she had seen her son only three times since he left, but his age and achievements had done little to alter the way she thought of him.

‘He’s still my little boy,’ she said, explaining how recognition of his dyslexia had helped him find ways around the difficulties that had overshadowed his school years.

For his eventual arrival, she had prepared a greeting that would be familiar to any son returning later than expected: ‘…and what time do you call this, Karl?’

Keith, meanwhile, became an important source of practical support, providing weather updates from Hereford as his son tackled the Bering Strait in 2006.

When Bushby finally reached the Russian side, he rang his father with an exuberant declaration of ‘Terra firma, terra firma’ – relief that was understandable after the dangers of crossing between continents on sea ice.

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Accompanied by fellow adventurer Dimitri Kieffer, Bushby had negotiated the frozen waters between Alaska and Russia, only to discover that arriving alive did not mean he would be permitted to continue.

Russian authorities detained the pair because they had entered away from an official border crossing, turning a remarkable physical achievement into a bureaucratic battle that threatened the expedition’s future.

It was far from his first experience of surviving a dangerous landscape only to find himself behind bars.

In 2001, after passing through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, he was detained for 18 days while officials established who he was and what he was doing in a restricted border region affected by conflict involving FARC guerrillas, the Colombian military and Panamanian police.

The crossing had required him to think as much about avoiding attention as finding a route through the jungle.

Fearing that a foreign traveller with expensive outdoor equipment would be an obvious kidnapping target, he dyed his hair and skin, reduced his clothes to tatters and carried his possessions in sacks, hoping to pass as someone living on the streets.

Elsewhere, the expedition brought threats at gunpoint, a near encounter with a polar bear and an ordeal in Alaska in which he was buried by snow.

Yet Bushby has been equally conscious of the less dramatic hazards that rarely make an adventurer’s story: sunstroke, exhaustion and the traffic passing close beside him on busy roads.

In his account, the repeated near misses with vehicles could be as frightening as the more spectacular dangers, while the problems that kept him stationary sometimes proved harder to overcome than anything he encountered on foot. 

He claimed that almost half his time away had been spent resolving difficulties involving visas, politics and sponsorship.

The financial crash cost him potential backers, and Russia’s later refusal to extend his visa prompted a response that would have seemed extraordinary from almost anyone else – he undertook another long walk. 

Travelling across the United States to the Russian embassy in Washington, he turned his predicament into a public campaign that eventually helped secure permission to resume his route.

By 2017 he had reached Mongolia, but the onward journey through Central Asia would bring further delays as the pandemic closed borders and political tensions restricted his options.

When the intended land route became impossible, the Caspian Sea offered a daunting alternative. 

In 2024, Bushby and fellow long-distance walker Angela Maxwell, whom he had met years earlier while crossing the Gobi Desert, undertook a 288km crossing from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan, supported by safety boats and joined by two Azerbaijani swimmers.

Neither walker regarded themselves as a natural swimmer, and the challenge required them to cope with rough seas, strong winds and the mental strain of spending weeks on the water. 

They swam in sessions, resting and sleeping aboard the support boats, where games of dominoes provided a distraction when conditions allowed and keeping dinner down became a challenge when they did not.

Even after reaching western Europe, Bushby faced one final obstacle between himself and Britain. 

His request to walk through the Channel Tunnel’s service tunnel was refused, leaving him to attempt another supported swim, this time across the English Channel.

After approximately 20 hours in the water over three days, he came ashore at Shakespeare Beach near Dover on October 5, where his father was among those waiting alongside filmmaker Werner Herzog, who is directing a documentary about the journey. 

Britain was finally beneath his feet again, although reaching Hull remained the condition on which his long-awaited return depended.

For all the risks and frustrations, Bushby’s account of his travels has been shaped by the people who helped him continue. 

Strangers offered food, water and money, cared for him when he was ill and sought him out after reading about his progress, sometimes travelling considerable distances to find him beside the road.

Their generosity crossed economic boundaries, with support coming from people who had little to spare as well as those able to provide more substantial help.

In Chile, one family became so close that he regarded them almost as another family, while the conversations and friendships formed along the route offered companionship in a life otherwise defined by departures. 

Those departures carried their own cost: Bushby has fallen in love twice during the expedition and lost both relationships as he continued walking, losses he has described as among its hardest experiences.

The prospect of finishing has nevertheless brought uncertainty alongside relief. 

After 28 years spent organising his life around the next stretch of road, Bushby must now work out what follows the mission that has sustained him for so long.

For today, however, there is still a destination ahead: a front gate in Hull, a mother waiting to embrace her son, and a family reunion that has been almost three decades in the making.

READ MORE: After 28 years of walking 30,000 miles around the world, Karl Bushby is almost home. He’s been robbed, imprisoned, and almost bled to death. But what he’s most afraid of now is waking up in his childhood bedroom in Hull and wondering what to do next