After 28 years walking the world, this Brit says the hardest part may be the last 30 miles home

For nearly three decades, Karl Bushby has lived by one rule: keep moving forward on foot. Now, with home sitting about 30 miles away, the 57-year-old says the most unsettling part of his 31,000 mile journey might be what comes next.

The finish line is finally in sight

Bushby is currently walking through the Lincolnshire countryside with a trolley packed with camping gear, drawing waves, horn beeps and selfie requests as he passes. Near Market Rasen, drivers were seen acknowledging him on the roadside, while a group of motorcyclists stopped to get photos with him.

For most people, that kind of attention would mark the triumphant end of an extraordinary challenge. For Bushby, it also marks the approach of something he openly says he is not sure how to handle. He has said that the purpose and reason for his life is about to end, and that trying to blend back into a society he no longer knows is going to be difficult.

When he does reach home, he is expected to stay with his mother, Angela. He has not seen her in a decade. His father, Keith, was there to meet him on the beach in Dover after Bushby swam the channel on October 5, another reminder that even in the closing stretch of this trek, the milestones have hardly become ordinary.

A walk that started with a challenge and two strict rules

Bushby was 29 when he began the journey on November 1, 1998, setting off from the tip of South America with £300. His destination was not simply another continent or a famous landmark. The plan was to return all the way to Hull, on foot.

The idea grew out of a birthday card from his father in the mid 1990s. Keith, an Army veteran, referred to an old special forces debate about whether it was possible to walk from London to New York using the Bering land bridge, the frozen stretch between Alaska and Siberia.

Bushby shaped that spark into a personal mission with two non-negotiable rules. He could not use any form of transport to move forward, and he had to make it all the way back home on foot. Those rules turned what might have been a rugged expedition into something much bigger: a 28-year trek across four continents that has stretched to 31,000 miles.

It also turned ordinary obstacles into massive ones. A closed route, a denied visa or bad weather did not mean taking a quick lift to the next checkpoint. It meant waiting, backtracking, or finding some other legal way to continue without breaking the terms he had set for himself.

Nearly every extreme you can imagine happened somewhere along the way

Bushby’s route has involved hazards that sound less like one journey and more like a stack of different survival stories. Early on, he battled hurricane-force winds on the Patagonian Steppe. He navigated the Darien Gap, the rainforest and mountain barrier that divides the American continent, while also avoiding a civil war there.

He has spoken about floating through crocodile-infested waters in Colombia, being attacked by an angry mob in Peru, and facing a standoff with a polar bear. In Peru, he was also helped back to health after a bad stomach infection by a doctor’s family. Elsewhere, he says he was welcomed into homes and shelters, including shacks built from car parts, and fed hundreds of times by strangers who wanted nothing in return.

One of the most dramatic chapters came in 2006, when Bushby crossed the Bering Strait with American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer. During that attempt, he survived a near-fatal fall into freezing water and nearly lost all his supplies. After the pair made it across, they were jailed and faced deportation for entering Russia illegally. Bushby was also rescued by helicopter after ending up on an ice floe drifting out to sea in the Bering Strait.

His clashes with official borders were not limited to that region. In 2001, he spent 18 days in jail after crossing a restricted border zone in Panama.

The bureaucracy lasted years. So did the detours

If the landscape tested him physically, paperwork tested him in another way entirely. Bushby’s progress through Russia took almost 10 years because of visa trouble and severe weather that allowed travel only for a few months each year.

When Russia denied him a visa in 2012, he responded with another walk, this time from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, in protest. He eventually secured the paperwork he needed. Whenever plans in Russia fell apart, he would return to the United States or Mexico to cut costs and wait until he could go back and resume from the exact point where he had stopped.

Other countries brought their own complications. He was followed by police in China. The Covid pandemic caused a lengthy delay. Later, geopolitical problems blocked off Russia and Iran, and Bushby was forced to swim across the Caspian Sea for 31 days.

Money became its own obstacle too. After sponsors withdrew following the 2008 financial crisis, he lost a major source of support. For the past 16 years, he has relied mainly on a US media company that is backing a documentary from filmmaker Werner Herzog.

What 28 years on the road gave him, and what it cost

Bushby’s life on the move has left marks far beyond his passport. He has found love more than once during the journey, spending seven years with a woman from Colombia and three years with a woman from Japan, although his nomadic way of living meant neither relationship lasted.

He also has a son from his first marriage, who mostly grew up without him during the trip and is now in his mid-30s. That detail sits alongside the scale of the feat itself, a reminder that a journey this long reshapes family life as much as geography.

Still, when Bushby looks back, the thing he emphasises most is not danger, deprivation or spectacle. It is kindness. He has said he has been welcomed in by the poorest of the poor and that, across cultures and countries, the response has been overwhelmingly generous. In his view, he has encountered 99.9999% of the very best of humanity.

That may be why the last part feels so strange. After 28 years of measuring life in steps, borders and survival, Bushby is almost back in Hull. The world walk that defined his adult life is about to stop. For a man who has spent decades proving he can keep going, the unanswered question is no longer whether he can make it home. It is what home looks like when the walking finally ends.