Briton walks 50,000 km in 28 years and finally returns home

Briton Karl Bushby, who spent 28 years walking home from South America, reached his hometown of Kingston upon Hull in eastern England on Monday. According to news agencies, hundreds of people welcomed him in the city square.

“This is absolutely amazing, thank you so much. We have never had a homecoming like this, I’m sure of that,” said the 57-year-old Bushby, wearing burgundy shorts and a black sweatshirt. He pushed the cart with his camping gear, which accompanied him all the way, to the town hall. “I couldn’t have done it alone… You have no idea how many people helped me overcome the obstacles,” he added. Mayor Mary Coward told him: “We are all proud of you, proud of your courage.”

The idea came from a gift from his father

It all began in the mid-1990s with a greeting card from his father Keith. It mentioned a long-running dispute among former special forces soldiers: whether it was possible to walk from London to New York across the former Bering land bridge. Bushby, a former British paratrooper, drew a continuous line on the map across Europe and Asia into North America and continued it down to the southern tip of Chile. “And that was it,” he recalled.

He was almost 30 when he set off from southern South America on 1 November 1998. There were two rules: not to use transport to move forward, and to return home on foot.

Ice, crocodiles and visas

Over that time he covered 50,000 kilometres across four continents and 30 countries, crossed the Bering Strait over drifting ice, and swam the Caspian Sea and the English Channel. He came face to face with a polar bear, rafted down a river with crocodiles to avoid the guerrilla war in Colombia, was attacked by a mob in Peru, and was rescued by helicopter from an ice floe drifting out to sea.

The journey often had to be interrupted. Moscow refused him a visa for many years. Visa problems, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid pandemic together delayed him, by his own account, by 14 years.

The final stretch and the fear of ordinary life

After a short ceremony, the very last leg awaited him: the road to the home of his mother Angela, where he will see his 36-year-old son Adam and a 12-year-old granddaughter he has never met. Returning to ordinary life, Bushby admits, frightens him: “The meaning and reason of my life will soon end. It will be hard… trying to fit back into a society you simply no longer know.”

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz