After 28 years and more than 30,000 miles on the road, adventurer Karl Bushby has finally reached the United Kingdom.
Bushby announced on Oct. 5 that he had swum the English Channel from France to England. Taking a break in Dover, he looked out at the Union Jack flying beyond his hotel and said, “I’m staring at the Union Jack flying outside this hotel. I’ve seen many flags over the days, but that one is special.”
He later shared a photo of one of his first meals back in Britain, celebrating with a plate of authentic fish and chips.
Karl Bushby celebrates after swimming across the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan in September 2024. (Resul Rehimov/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The expedition is not finished. Bushby plans to complete the final stretch and reach his mother’s home in Hull by the end of the month.
According to his website, the idea began with a birthday card from his father in the 1990s. It described two soldiers debating an apparently impossible journey from London to New York via the Bering Strait. Bushby picked up a map, drew a route between the cities and realized he had found his life’s mission.
Bushby is shown traveling through Dover, England, on Oct. 9, beginning the final 250-mile section of his 28-year expedition.
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The former paratrooper set out from Chile on Nov. 1, 1998, carrying just a few hundred dollars. “South America, you were young, it was all new, it was the boys adventure dream,” Bushby said.
He traveled north through the Americas, waiting for the Bering Strait to freeze so he could cross from Alaska into Russia. When Russia rejected his visa application in April 2012, the expedition came to a halt. In protest, Bushby began walking in the opposite direction toward the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. The ban was eventually reversed, allowing him to resume the journey. From Russia, he continued through Mongolia and China before swimming across the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan.
From there, his route carried him onward into Europe.
“You’ll find that you are way more capable than you think you are; people always underestimate themselves. The world always looks bigger and scarier than it actually is,” Bushby said.
Bushby walked through Cameron, North Carolina, in 2014 during the U.S. portion of his journey. (Megan Morr/Washington Post)
Bushby initially believed the journey would take 12 years. Instead, visa restrictions, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical upheaval, detention and several dangerous encounters repeatedly delayed him. Through it all, he says, the people he met kept him moving.
“The world is an incredible place, and it’s the people, the strangers that I have met along the way, that have kept me upright and moving forward,” Bushby said.
About 240 miles remain before Bushby reaches the end of a journey spanning 29 countries. “We went at a reasonable pace, we did what we needed to do and it has worked. I know it’s time to stop, I know that much because I feel that in the knees and ankles,” he said.