Karl Bushby nears the end of his 28-year walk around the world in Hull

From Punta Arenas to Hull

Karl Bushby, a former British paratrooper, left Punta Arenas in Chile on 1 November 1998, aged 29, to walk home to Hull. He set himself two rules: not to return to the UK before finishing, and not to use transport to advance. He is now 57 and due to reach his mother's home in Hull on Monday, 2 November. The walk has covered about 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) on foot, through 30 foreign countries and four continents, all but three of the world's seven. The idea dates to the mid-1990s, when a birthday card from his father, an army veteran, mentioned a special forces debate about walking from London to New York over the Bering land bridge. Bushby drew a continuous line through Europe and Asia to North America, then carried on south to the tip of Chile instead of heading for New York. He calls the project the Goliath Expedition.

Russia, the Caspian and the wildlife

Russia was the slowest leg. Harsh weather allowed only a few months of travel each year, bureaucratic delays piled up, and after he crossed the Bering Strait he was detained once and faced deportation for entering illegally. Russia denied him a visa in 2012, so he walked 3,500 miles (5,600 kilometers) from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest, which eventually secured the paperwork. The country still took about a decade. When conflicts closed passage through Russia and Iran, he swam the Caspian Sea, the world's largest inland body of water, in a 31-day crossing he calls "floatimming", a mix of floating and swimming in a flotation vest and wetsuit. Other dangers included a standoff with a polar bear, a float through crocodile-infested waters to avoid a guerrilla war in Colombia, a mob attack in Peru and a helicopter rescue from an ice floe drifting out to sea.

First estimate5

Actual duration28

First estimate

5 years

Actual duration

28 years

Data from the article text

Doubts about life after the walk

Near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the finish, he was pushing a cart of camping gear up a busy road. He is anxious about the prospect of living in his mother's basement and expects an identity crisis once the walk ends. He put it bluntly:

“My purpose and reason for living is about to end.”

A few miles into the final leg, his handcart, which carries essential supplies, sustained a puncture and he stopped for a hasty roadside repair. He describes what lies ahead in stark terms:

“Everything that I am and everything that I know of me is going to go away.”

A homecoming with family waiting

At the end he will be met by his 36-year-old son, a 12-year-old granddaughter he has never met, his father and his brothers. His mother will wait at the childhood home he left 28 years ago. The trip has taken nearly three times as long as Odysseus needed to return to Penelope in Ithaca, a comparison Bushby brushed off by saying the Greek hero was a bit of an amateur.