After 28 Years, Karl Bushby Has Finally Reached Britain — But His Walk Home Isn’t Over

For most people, the idea of walking home sounds ordinary.

It might mean a 20-minute stroll from work. Perhaps an hour-long walk after dinner. Maybe a few miles along a familiar road before arriving at the front door.

For Karl Bushby, “walking home” became something entirely different.

It became a journey across continents, deserts, jungles, frozen seas, political borders and some of the most difficult terrain on Earth.

In 1998, the former British paratrooper left South America with an extraordinary goal: to walk all the way back to his hometown of Hull in England without using transport to move himself forward.

He expected the journey to take roughly 12 years.

Instead, nearly three decades later, he has finally reached British soil.

On 5 October 2026, Bushby arrived at Shakespeare Beach near Dover after completing a multi-day swim across the English Channel from France. He had spent almost 28 years travelling toward the country he once left behind.

But there was an important detail.

He had not yet reached home.

Hull was still hundreds of kilometres away.

And so, even after crossing an international sea passage at the end of a journey that has already taken him around the world, Bushby's expedition continues.

His final destination is his mother's house in Hull.

That means the man who has spent almost three decades walking across the planet still has one last walk to make.

A Journey That Began in 1998

Bushby's story began on 1 November 1998, when he left Punta Arenas in southern Chile and began heading north.

He was 29 years old.

At the time, the expedition probably looked less like one of the world's great endurance adventures and more like an impossible idea that might eventually be abandoned.

Bushby had only a small amount of money and no guarantee that his plan would work. According to accounts of the expedition, he started with around $500 in his pocket.

The concept, however, was brutally simple.

He would travel around the world without using transport to advance his position.

He also established another rule for himself: he would not return home until the journey was complete.

That second rule would prove almost as important as the first.

Because once he left Britain, home was no longer somewhere he could simply fly back to when things became difficult.

Every obstacle had to be solved from the road.

Every border had to be negotiated.

Every closed route required another plan.

Every delay meant more time away.

And every kilometre had to bring him closer to Hull.

The expedition became known as the Goliath Expedition, an attempt to create what Bushby describes as an unbroken journey around the globe. His route eventually stretched through dozens of countries and across roughly 50,000 kilometres, although published estimates of the total distance vary depending on how the route is measured.

The original 12-year estimate quickly began to disappear into the distance.

Twelve years became 15.

Then 20.

Then 25.

And eventually, 28.

The Road Was Never Supposed to Be Easy

Walking around the world sounds difficult even before the details are considered.

But Bushby's route was not designed around the easiest roads.

There were deserts.

Mountains.

Tropical forests.

Political conflicts.

Frozen waters.

Remote settlements.

International borders.

And places where simply finding a legal way forward became harder than physically walking the distance itself.

One of the earliest and most dangerous sections came in South America.

Bushby crossed the Darién Gap, the notorious wilderness between Panama and Colombia. The region has long been known for its difficult terrain and serious security risks, including criminal and armed groups.

For Bushby, there was no convenient highway through the jungle.

The road simply disappeared.

So he went through the jungle.

Accounts of the expedition describe months of preparation for the crossing and an approach influenced by his military background. He had to navigate rivers, dense vegetation and dangerous territory while trying to avoid armed groups.

It was not merely a test of endurance.

It was a test of planning.

The Darién Gap demonstrated something that would become a recurring theme throughout Bushby's journey: the greatest obstacle was not always distance.

Sometimes it was uncertainty.

Crossing the Bering Strait on Foot

Years later came one of the most extraordinary chapters of the entire expedition.

In 2006, Bushby and French-American adventurer Dimitri Kieffer attempted to cross the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia.

The distance between the two sides is not simply a stretch of open ocean.

The region contains sea ice, shifting floes, freezing water and constantly changing conditions.

Bushby and Kieffer travelled across frozen sections of the strait on foot, sometimes having to deal with open water between pieces of ice.

The crossing became one of the expedition's defining achievements.

They reached Russian territory, but the adventure did not end there.

Instead, they were detained by Russian authorities because they had not entered through a recognised border checkpoint.

It was an almost perfect illustration of the unusual nature of Bushby's mission.

He was attempting to obey the physical rules of his expedition, but the modern world is governed by another set of rules entirely.

Borders are not simply lines on a map.

They are legal systems.