“It’s a big moment,” says Karl Bushby, who has had plenty of big moments in his life. He is recording himself on his phone for social media. “We’re in Dover, and I’m about to have my first fish and chips and mushy peas in 28 years. Mushy peas, my God, I forgot they even existed!” He points his phone at the plate in front of him. “It better be good.” And he tucks in. “Mmmm. See, this is a big chunk of fish and a decent bit of batter, and that’s something you don’t see in other parts of the world. I mean, come on! That. Is. Fish. And. Chips! You see, Britain is special.”
It has been two days since Bushby swam the Channel to return to England. Tomorrow, he’ll start the walk home to Hull for the first time since he left in 1998. He hopes to get back on 1 November, the same date he set off all those years ago.
Although Bushby is a man of military precision, timing is not one of his greatest traits. When the former paratrooper left the army, aged 29, to walk the world, he planned to be home 12 years later. What accounted for the extra years? “The real world. You can’t account for financial crises, pandemics, visa bans, wars and the bureaucracy you have to deal with. It took 28 years because of the rules and because we refused to compromise on the route.” I ask what he means by “we”? He smiles. “It’s the royal we. Me and the Beast.”
Ah, the Beast. That’s the customised golf trolley he travelled with, containing essential survival equipment, camping supplies, electronics and food. The original Beast lasted three years before it broke down and had to be put out to grass. The Beast 2, an upgrade he built in Nicaragua, has survived 25 years.
View image in fullscreenKarl Bushby on Shakespeare Beach in Dover. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
Rather than circumnavigating the globe, which is impossible without transport, Bushby decided to walk about as far as he possibly could. As his starting point he chose the southernmost city on the South American continent, Punta Arenas in Chile (53 deg S), and planned to make his way across the Americas, Asia and Europe back to his home town, Hull (which is, at 53 deg N, the latitudinal mirror image of Punta Arenas). He was guided by two simple self-made rules: he could use no transport to advance, and there was no going home until he arrived on foot, mission completed. If he had to make a detour or pause his trip, by force or by choice, he would use transport, but always restart at the exact spot where he had stopped.
Bushby has walked approximately 36,000 miles (58,000km), breaking the record for the longest unbroken foot journey and far exceeding the 25,000-mile circumference of the world. When he gets home he will be the first person to have walked continuously across the world, visiting 29 countries. En route, he broke other records (as part of the first teams to complete the crossing of the Bering Strait, from Alaska to Russia, on foot in modern times, and to swim the Caspian Sea, from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan). He has also almost died, spent years stuck in Mexico because he lost his sponsor, been convicted of being a spy, been held in custody in Russia and sentenced to deportation, been threatened at gunpoint and faced the prospect of predation by a polar bear. To many he’s a hero. To some, he’s a reckless chancer.
“Luckily for me, when dealing with the gunmen, I had copies of newspaper clippings about me from South America. With them I could talk my way out of anything”
We meet at the White Horse in Dover, its walls graffitied with the times people have taken to swim the Channel. Bushby looks at them and says they show what an amateur he is. It took him 20 hours over three days to swim the 21 miles (34km) on his back. “There’s one over there who did it in 10 hours. Swimmers normally go twice the speed I did. Real swimmers are in trunks, caps and a pair of goggles. I’ve got a wetsuit, fins, paddles for my hands, a flotation vest, neckI don’t call what I do swimming, out of respect for real swimmers. I call it “floatimming.” Bushby looks fit in the way people who take regular walks do. His face is tanned from sun and wind, his hair still blond, his eyes sea blue. But he is also very different from the man who set out three decades ago. At 29, Bushby was skinny with shoulder-length hair—a dead ringer for Kurt Cobain. Once the media started reporting on his “Goliath expedition,” a joke-slash-conspiracy theory went around that the former Nirvana frontman wasn’t really dead; he was just walking the world under the pseudonym Karl Bushby.
In Chile, 1999. Photograph: Courtesy of Karl Bushby
Today, at 57, he is strong, with a bone-crunching handshake, a fuller face, and a hint of middle-aged spread. He says people don’t expect him to look the way he does. They either imagine him as Gandalf, with a white beard down to his knees, or as a ripped athlete. “Everyone’s saying: if he’s been walking 28 years, why does he look so fat? But most of the time I’m eating out of gas stations, burger bars, sitting somewhere for three months waiting for a visa, getting older, eating biscuits and cookies.”
He has brought along a friend, Angela Maxwell, a 44-year-old American who spent six and a half years walking the world, some of it alongside Bushby. She also swam the Caspian Sea with him over 31 days in 2024, accompanied by Anastasia Boborykina and Abdurrahman Rustamov, two young Azerbaijani champion swimmers.
Maxwell tells me that in many ways she and Bushby are different, but they are similar in important ways. “We’re both introverts, even hermits in some way. We like our autonomy.” Maxwell is a funny and talkative introvert. Bushby is a more conventional introvert—quiet, understated, dry.
‘I wouldn’t quit – I just won’t let go’ … Karl Bushby. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
Bushby grew up in a military family. His father, Keith, is an SAS veteran who spent 24 years in the British army, and his younger brother, Adrian, is also an army man. His mother, another Angela, worked in a factory.
School, Bushby says, was a “living hell.” Dyslexic (though undiagnosed), he was branded as “thick” and found solace in birdwatching. He left school at 16 with no qualifications and joined the junior Parachute regiment. But he struggled with the physical demands and took five attempts to pass the gruelling P Company training before eventually joining the 3rd battalion of the Parachute regiment. Some mocked him for his repeated failures, but others were impressed by his tenacity. “Normally, they’ll allow you two or three attempts.” Why did he get five? “Because I wouldn’t quit … that was probably one of the first signs. I just won’t let go. I’m a bit of a rottweiler.”
Bushby remained an outsider in the paras, not least because he didn’t like booze. “I was never a beer drinker. And that’s very bad news in the army. Very difficult. It can be a problem.” Throughout his military career, he felt his peers didn’t trust or respect him.
In his early 20s, stationed in Northern Ireland, he married a Belfast woman, yet another Angela. Five years later, when they were living in Hampshire, they divorced. She returned home to Belfast with their young son, Adam. At the time, servicemen were only allowed into Northern Ireland if they were serving there, so Bushby was effectively separated from Adam.
There was another thing gnawing away at him. A professional, or existential, crisis. The world was at peace, which was catastrophic for those who had joined the military hoping to see action. Between 1990 and 1995, the British army was downsized from 160,000 to 120,000. Bushby kept his job, but he was bored and restless. “We were not being used. There was nothing going on. I was one of those guys looking for other challenges.”In life, we all became disillusioned because nothing was happening—what the Chinese call the “peace disease.” It’s hard to keep an army ready for combat when there’s nothing to do. As young soldiers, you’re eager to fight, but you end up in Northern Ireland standing guard at a gate every day. It’s not very appealing.”
View image in fullscreen Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
Ever since childhood, he had wanderlust, a longing for new horizons. “I used to dream about great big journeys on foot. I started drawing lines on maps, and the conversation spread between friends.” Had he ever done a big journey before? “No! Nothing.”
In his mid-20s, he got a birthday card from his father that mentioned a group of SAS soldiers discussing the possibility of walking from London to New York. That was an epiphany, Bushby says. There was a map on the wall, and he took a black marker pen and drew a line from the UK to Europe, through Asia, over the Bering Strait. Then he thought: why stop in New York? So he extended the line down to the bottom of the Americas. He knew there were a few obstacles, but as far as he was concerned, the whole world was connected if he could get over the Bering Strait. Not that he knew what the Bering Strait was, or that nobody had successfully crossed it in modern times, since it had broken down into treacherous blocks of ice. (Some scientists believe Paleo-Indian people may have crossed from Siberia into Alaska 17,000 years ago, when ocean levels were lower.)
For the next couple of years Bushby studied the route, working out how his dream could be turned into a reality. It meant swotting up on the subjects he’d flunked at school—maths, physics and geography. The more he studied, the more he told people he was going to do it. “Nobody took it seriously when I said I wanted to walk around the world. It was like, ‘Karl just had this crazy batshit idea of spending 12 years walking around the world. Yeah, whatever!’ That was the response from everybody, and that fuelled the fire. But I would look at the map, and think of what kind of life that would be. I couldn’t let go of that.”
He was also motivated by poor mental health. He was a keen distance runner, and if he went a single day without running, he suffered anxiety attacks. It got so bad that he saw a behavioural psychologist. “It dominated my life. It really did.”
Perhaps the biggest motivation of all was an overwhelming sense of his own mortality. “I took death seriously. You’re dying, you’ve got one life, and what are you going to do with it? That really resonated with me.”
Once Bushby had made up his mind, he accepted that he would never see his son growing up. If everything went to plan, Adam would be 20 when he got back (as it is, he is 36).
“That was a difficult decision,” Bushby says. “But the way I squared that circle was, ‘How would I be worth something to my son?’ Would I be worth more to him by doing something on this scale?'” He doesn’t sound wholly convinced by his argument.
On 1 November 1998, Bushby set off from his mother’s house. He flew to Chile, hitching a lift to the Falkland Islands on an RAF military transport flight. From there, he took a short civilian flight to cross over to his official starting point in Punta Arenas, Chile. He set off from there with $500 (then equal to about £300) of savings and the Beast, speaking no Spanish, and was met immediately with a ferocious environment on the Patagonian steppe. Hurricane-force winds were raging. The freezing gales forced him to lean at a 45-degree angle just to stay on his feet, for days at a time, while dust and grit pelted his face. He experienced suffocating altitude sickness, breathing difficulties and starvation.
Bushby soon realised that pushing his way across the wind-lashed, bone-dry plateau was a death sentence. He altered his route to cross the Andes and headed west towards the coast.The terrain was still brutal—at one point he survived on a single banana for three days—but he began to meet people who changed how he saw humanity. When he needed warmth, food, or just company, they gave it. “There are so many examples. Where would we be without the help we’ve had? Just the simple things. You’ll find people living in shacks by the road, built from car parts—hoods and doors taped together. They’re barely getting by, but they’ll give you a bowl of rice and water.”
By now he was starting to speak Spanish, but often he didn’t exchange a single word with those who helped him. “I was walking through the Atacama Desert in Chile. There’s one main highway, Route 5, so the truckers and bus drivers see the same guy over the months as you slowly move forward, and eventually they become your support network. You’re in the driest desert in the world, and those trucks are passing me fruit, and bottles of water get thrown out for me. I don’t know who’s in that truck, but they’re looking after me.”
He tells me about a Chilean family who would regularly drive hundreds of miles to bring him supplies and spend time with him. Then there was the stranger who pulled up to him on the highway, asked if he was Karl Bushby, and handed him an envelope with a huge booklet of food vouchers for meals at Bavaria, a German-Chilean restaurant chain with outlets along the highway. The man, Michael Bier, also gave him $100 on the condition that Bushby personally deliver a postcard to a friend in Vienna—which he eventually did, 27 years later.
Bushby admits he had a cynical view of humankind before the walk. “Twelve years in the army, you don’t get to see the best of humanity, but the kindness of strangers…” He trails off. “I always say 99.999% of the people I met represented the very best of humanity. Every country has been the same.”
And he met them just when he needed them most. In 2000, in Peru, he caught a severe stomach infection along with multiple secondary bacterial infections that left him fearing the worst. “This guy stopped me one day and said: ‘Come and stay with us when you get to the next town.’ His wife happened to be a doctor running an analysis company. I walk in, sick as a dog, they take blood and samples, put me in bed for the week, give me quadruple doses of antibiotics, get me back on my feet, and don’t want anything for it.” He shakes his head in wonder. “Another miracle,” he says.
The one time he did meet the 0.001% of people who weren’t the best of humanity was in Colombia. “At the time, the country was a lawless mix of insurgency, counterinsurgency, drugs, and counternarcotics intelligence agencies. There was even MI6 chasing the IRA, who were teaching the leftwing guerrillas how to make bombs. Nobody trusted anything or anyone. I was a blond-haired gringo in the kidnap capital of the world. Pretty stupid.”
But he fell in love with the country and with a woman named Catalina, whom he was with for seven years. “She struggled because no country north of Panama would let her in, because she was a single woman and Colombian. She was a civil engineer, very intelligent.” But she couldn’t cope with the instability of their life. “Eventually, she was headhunted by an energy company in Spain and met someone there.” His heart was broken—not for the last time.
He left Colombia around 2000 via the notorious Darién Gap, a 60-mile (97km) stretch of dense rainforest, swamps, and mountains that served as cover for guerrilla groups such as the leftwing Farc and the rightwing AUC on the border between Colombia andPanama. The gap is the only break in the Pan-American Highway, the world’s longest drivable road, and Bushby had to cross it because it was the only way to reach Panama. He dressed as a vagrant to avoid attention, with maps, compasses, and essential medicines sewn into hidden pockets in his clothes. Sometimes he swam downstream on his back, disguised as debris.
Was it scary? “Oh yes, absolutely. I found myself at gunpoint a few times. People are often executed when caught by the revolutionary armed forces.”
What happened when he was held at gunpoint? Again, he says he was lucky. “These situations weren’t that bad. I’ve been held at gunpoint by someone who bumped into me in the dark and was scared. And usually it’s the police or army. There was a situation where you find yourself confronted by a right-wing paramilitary organization.” By now, his Spanish was decent. How did he talk his way out of being shot? “Keep smiling, play it down. Don’t get angry. Just a smile will get you through so much. Just defuse, defuse, de-conflict and you’re going to be all right.”
With a Panamanian family. Photograph: Courtesy of Karl Bushby
He was also helped by a file he carried documenting his journey. “Luckily for me, when dealing with those people, I had all these copies of newspaper clippings from South America. With them I could talk my way out of anything.”
Between 2002 and 2005, he traveled through America, eventually reaching Alaska, where he faced the most dangerous part of the expedition. To get from the US to Russia, he had to cross the Bering Strait, a narrow 51-mile (82km) frozen waterway connecting the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. The problem is that it is no longer completely frozen. Pieces are constantly breaking off as ice turns into sea and back again. Nobody had ever successfully crossed from Alaska to Siberia on foot (going the other way is easier because you move with the natural drift of the ice, whereas going toward Russia means you’re fighting against the ice). Bushby teamed up with French-American adventurer Dimitri Kieffer – neither had experience of Arctic conditions.
A BBC crew went out to film the mission but had to return to base early because the trek was too dangerous. In the introduction, the presenter, Morland Sanders, said: “Karl Bushby, the ex-paratrooper on a mission that nobody has ever done before. To walk, swim, stumble across a semi-frozen sea. The chances are he won’t make it across alive.” Bushby told Sanders that throughout his life he’d constantly dealt with failure, and now he was out there proving himself. “Some people might think it’s ludicrous, some people might think it’s irresponsible, some people out there will understand the way I feel. Some things in life are worth dying for.” And he and Kieffer almost did.
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‘Chances are he won’t make it across alive’ … the Bering Strait. Photograph: Courtesy of Karl Bushby
At one point, the thin ice shelf beneath them gave way, and their 90kg supply sleds plunged into the sub-zero ocean water. Losing those sleds meant certain death from starvation or hypothermia in -30C temperatures. In terrifying footage filmed by the two men, we see them pulling the waterlogged sleds back onto solid ice before they could be sucked under the shifting ice packs.
They also came face to face with a polar bear. “We tried to scare it off, but all we had were fireworks and they were useless. So eventually we inched our way toward this bear. It stops and it’s looking at us. If it wanted us, we’re dead. There’s no escape at this point. It stood up to get a better look at us and it just rose into the sky like a freaking skyscraper. It was horrifying. They are huuuuge. Massive.” The bear stared them down, then wandered off. He exhales loudly, the relief still fresh. “There was just no way you’re getting away from that.”
Although the condiThe rations were almost perfect, but it looked like they didn’t have enough food to last. Then, on one amazing day, they managed 12 miles, and after 14 days they made it across, just before running out. Another miracle, Bushby says. How did it feel to make history? “It’s a pretty good feeling.”
In Siberia, 2008. Photograph: Courtesy of Karl Bushby
On reaching Siberia, the pair were arrested on suspicion of spying, charged, and convicted. The authorities wanted them to serve at least five years. In the end, they relented and sent them back to Alaska.
But none of these challenges was the hardest for Bushby. The hardest was walking away from love. Or love walking away from him. In Mongolia, he met a Japanese woman named Rika. The relationship lasted three years, and eventually she gave up on him too. By then, the pandemic had begun, and he had returned to Mexico because it was cheap to live there, while Rika was in New Zealand. “She found someone else because we’d been separated for years. That is the hardest thing about this journey.”
Did he never think love should come before the expedition? “No. Mission first,” he says. “If you look at my diaries from Hull, I write about how I’m going to fall in love, how I’m going to keep going, and how I’m going to get burned by this. It was in the prophecy and it was foretold.”
“My son had to deal with those questions: why is my father out there and not home? As he matured, we’ve managed to have those conversations.”
To be fair, I say, you didn’t make it easy for the women in your life. “Oh no. It was not the way to run relationships. But we knew we weren’t going to stop,” he says. I ask if he started saying “we” to make himself feel less alone. “I don’t know, but now it’s out of respect for everyone else who made this happen. I owe the world a lot. Don’t ever think it’s just me. It was never me. It is a ‘we’ thing. ‘We’ got me across the Channel to this beach in Dover. Me and a support network like no other. Before that, I just had the army behind me – now I have the world.”
Bushby says he has led a selfish life. When he set off, he knew that if either of his parents died while he was away, he would not return for their funeral. When his son, Adam, almost died in a motorbike accident, he didn’t return home. He tells me he has a 12-year-old granddaughter he is yet to meet.
Does he get on well with Adam now? “Yeah, me and Adam are great.” Did Adam ever ask why he hadn’t been there for him when he was growing up? “No, he accepted it. In those early years, he had to deal with those questions: why is my father out there and not home? As he matured, we’ve managed to have those conversations. To his credit, he rolled with the punches. He understands his father, and he’s one of my big fans.”
Karl Bushby and Angela Maxwell in the waters off Baku 2024, preparing to swim the Caspian. Photograph: https://www.tiktok.com/@karlcbushby
Maxwell adds: “All adventure could be labelled selfish, because you’re going to hike the greatest mountain and someone dies from an avalanche and they’ve got a wife and kids back home. You explore something and then you die in the sea. To have an adventure is self-centred.”
“Totally self-centred,” agrees Bushby. “This 28 years has been about keeping me. I have been the centre of my world. It has been about getting me from A to B, looking after me, giving me the money so I can survive. Totally self-centred.”
Has his family told him he’s been selfish? “Not family, no.”
“Everyone else!” Maxwell says, laughing.
“When you look at some of our great heroes, like Shackleton and Cook, they were the worst family men you could humanly imagine,” Bushby says. “They abandoned families left, right and centre. That’s the bit that
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs Karl Bushbys 28Year Walk Home
The Basics
Who is Karl Bushby
A British former paratrooper who set out in 1998 to walk around the world from the southern tip of South America all the way back to his home in Hull England without leaving the ground
What is the Goliath Expedition
Thats the name Bushby gave his journey His rule no flights no backtracking He had to keep moving forward on foot until he reached home
How long was the journey supposed to take
He planned for about 8 years It ended up taking roughly 28
How far did he walk
About 36000 miles more than the circumference of the Earth
Why is the phrase some things are worth dying for connected to him
Bushby said he was willing to risk his life to finish the walk He faced freezing oceans armed kidnappers and polar bears and he kept going To him finishing the promise he made to himself mattered more than safety
The Route and the Journey
Where did he start and finish
He started in Punta Arenas Chile in 1998 and finally walked into Hull England in 2025
What countries did he cross
He walked the length of South America through Central America the United States Canada and Alaska Then he crossed into Russia walked across Asia and Europe and headed for the UK
What was the hardest part
The Bering Strait crossing in 2006 He and a companion walked on frozen sea ice from Alaska to Russia a feat many thought was impossible The extreme cold and open water were deadly
Did he really get kidnapped
Yes In 2006 while crossing the remote Chukotka region of Russia he was detained by armed men and held for weeks before being released
Did he have problems with governments
Yes Russia banned him from reentering for several years which stalled the expedition He also had visa and permit troubles in several countries
Did he ever quit
No He paused at times for money permits and family but he never gave up on finishing
Common Problems and Challenges
