He left Chile on foot twenty-eight years ago, with a rule he has never broken: not to use means of transport to advance along the route and return home under his own power. Now the British adventurer Karl Bushby is close to the finish line: according to the Associated Press agency, he is scheduled to arrive in Hull, his city in north-eastern England, on Monday. Around 50 thousand kilometers behind us, across 30 countries and four continents.
The departure from Punta Arenas
A former British Army paratrooper, Bushby set out on 1 November 1998 from Punta Arenas, in the extreme south of Chile. The project, dubbed the “Goliath Expedition”, envisaged reaching home without interruptions along the way and without returning to Hull before the end. When he had to leave the route, for example to renew his visas, he always started from the exact point where he stopped. The journey, which in the initial plans was supposed to last a dozen years, was extended due to natural, bureaucratic and geopolitical obstacles.
Bering, the Caspian and the English Channel
In 2006 Bushby crossed the Bering Strait on foot, walking on the ice for about two weeks together with the French explorer Dimitri Kieffer: upon arrival in Russia the two were stopped by border guards because they had not entered through an official border crossing. In the following years, Moscow also banned him from entering the country, a ban that was later revoked.
To get around Russia and Iran, in 2024 he swam across the Caspian Sea, from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan: about 290 kilometers in 31 days. The last major obstacle was the English Channel. After saying no to the request to walk through the tunnel under the canal, Bushby obtained special permission from the French authorities and swam across it, in several stages over three days, landing on 5 October at Shakespeare Beach, near Dover.
The last kilometers
Since then he has walked about 400 kilometers up England to his family home in Hull, which he hasn’t seen since 1998.