DOVER, England: British adventurer Karl Bushby is back on English soil, closing out a 28-year walk around the world that began in Chile in 1998 and now has only the road home left on it. The 57-year-old former paratrooper swam the English Channel and stepped ashore at Shakespeare Beach near Dover on Monday, October 5, his first footsteps in Britain in nearly three decades. He is now covering the final 250 miles to his mother’s house in Hull. The arrival is timed for November 1, the same date he set out from Punta Arenas 28 years ago.
The homecoming has turned Bushby into a viral fixture this week. A post from the account Internet Hall of Fame saluting his return has drawn more than 1,700 likes since Thursday, and the details packed into it read like pulp fiction: nearly 36,000 miles walked across 29 countries, threats at gunpoint, a deportation, and polar bears that got close enough to matter.
The trek, formally known as the Goliath Expedition, ran on two rules Bushby set for himself, according to The National Desk: no motorized transport to advance the route, and no going home until the whole journey was finished on foot. He was 29 when he started and budgeted 12 years for the trip. Visa bans, the 2008 financial crisis, a pandemic and layers of bureaucracy stretched it toward three times that.
A long Guardian profile published Monday tallied the extremes along the way: deserts, kidnappers, near drownings and near starvation between the far corners of four continents. Along the route Bushby crossed the frozen Bering Strait on foot and swam the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan, legs of the journey his team counts as firsts for an unbroken passage of this kind.
The Channel swim that returned him to Britain took roughly 20 hours in the water spread across three days, after authorities refused him permission to walk the Channel Tunnel service passage. He has not seen his mother, Angela, since 2015. If the November 1 target holds, the expedition ends at her front door, 28 years and one swim after he walked away from it.
Endurance stories have run hot all year in the coverage Hypefresh tracks. Readers followed the Boston Marathon runner who crawled the final 1.2 miles after his legs gave out, a piece of finish-line grit Bushby would recognize. Next to his odometer, Paul Pierce’s 20-mile barefoot walk in a robe after a Celtics loss looks like a lap around the block, and John Cena’s Guinness World Record for Make-A-Wish visits shows the same appetite for showing up year after year.
Bushby told the paper the extra 16 years came down to what he calls the real world, the crises and paperwork nobody can schedule around. His expedition site is logging the final miles day by day. The finish line is not a ribbon but a doorstep, and it is finally within walking distance.
