And a person cannot always cross them simply because the ground—or ice—happens to connect one country to another.
When Bureaucracy Became the Enemy
Bushby's journey was never just about physical endurance.
In many ways, bureaucracy became one of his greatest opponents.
A runner can train for a mountain.
A swimmer can train for cold water.
A traveller can prepare for a desert.
But how do you prepare for a government changing its border policy?
How do you train for a visa that is suddenly denied?
How do you physically overcome a border that has been closed?
Bushby spent years dealing with exactly those questions.
At one point, he faced a Russian ban that threatened to derail the entire expedition.
Instead of abandoning the journey, he undertook another extraordinary journey within the journey itself.
He travelled thousands of kilometres across the United States to Washington, D.C., to make his case at the Russian Embassy.
Eventually, the ban was lifted and the expedition could continue.
This became one of the central characteristics of the Goliath Expedition.
The route was never completely under Bushby's control.
He could control whether he kept walking.
He could control his preparation.
He could control his determination.
But he could not control wars, pandemics, international sanctions, visa rules or border closures.
And those forces repeatedly changed the map in front of him.
The Pandemic Changed the Journey Again
By the late 2010s and early 2020s, Bushby had already spent more than two decades moving slowly across the planet.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic brought international travel to a near standstill.
Borders closed.
Countries imposed restrictions.
Routes that had once been theoretically possible became inaccessible.
For someone travelling by plane, these problems were frustrating.
For someone attempting to maintain an unbroken journey around the world on foot, they could be devastating.
The problem was especially severe in Central Asia.
Bushby had been working toward a route that would eventually take him toward Europe.
But political circumstances, restrictions and the closure of possible routes left him with an increasingly difficult problem.
The land route was disappearing.
He needed another answer.
And eventually, he found one that sounded almost unbelievable.
He would swim across the Caspian Sea.
The Caspian Sea: When Walking Was No Longer Enough
In 2024, Bushby began one of the most remarkable chapters of his expedition.
Rather than using a ferry or another form of transportation across the Caspian Sea, he attempted to travel from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan by swimming.
The scale of the challenge was enormous.
The crossing covered approximately 288 kilometres, and the expedition took 31 days, with Bushby spending more than 130 hours in the water according to accounts from the expedition. He was accompanied by fellow adventurer Angela Maxwell, Azerbaijani swimmers and a support team.
This was not a single continuous swim lasting several days.
The team followed a carefully structured system, swimming for several hours before returning to support vessels to rest, recover, eat and sleep.
Then they repeated the process.
Day after day.
For more than a month.
It was a remarkable solution to an equally remarkable problem.
The Caspian Sea represented something more profound than another physical obstacle.
It demonstrated the lengths to which Bushby was willing to go to preserve the original rules of his expedition.
A ferry would have been dramatically easier.
A boat would have been dramatically faster.
But either would have moved him forward by transport.
Swimming allowed him to continue under his own physical power.
The expedition's official account describes the crossing as a response to the disappearance of viable land routes through the region.
And so, after decades of walking, Bushby became a long-distance swimmer.
Not because swimming was his original plan.
But because the journey demanded it.
Europe Was Finally Within Reach
After the Caspian crossing, Bushby's route continued west.
For someone who had begun at the southern end of South America almost three decades earlier, Europe represented an extraordinary psychological milestone.
Home was no longer an abstract point on a map.
It was becoming geographically close.
But “close” is a relative word.
Even after reaching Europe, there were still hundreds and eventually thousands of kilometres to cover.
The expedition had already become vastly longer than Bushby's original estimate.
The man who had once imagined completing the journey in about 12 years had now spent more than twice that amount of time on the road.
And the final challenge was waiting across another body of water.
The English Channel.