He has crossed four continents, survived two broken relationships and spent almost 30 years pursuing one extraordinary goal.
In 1998, 29-year-old Karl Bushby said goodbye to his mother and grandmother in Hull, East Yorkshire. Wearing a camel-coloured jacket with his long, sandy hair flowing, he set out on a 30,000-mile journey around the world.
After flying to Chile’s southernmost tip, he began walking north, guided by two strict rules: he could not use transport to move his journey forward, and he would not return to Britain until the mission was complete.
Now, the former paratrooper is only days away from home.
Earlier this month, the 57-year-old reached British soil in Dover after swimming across the English Channel.
Having battled jungles, deserts and Arctic ice, Karl is now facing a challenge he never expected: readjusting to Britain—and to the person he has become there.
‘We are definitely in terra incognita [unknown territory] right now, or pretty soon will be,’ Karl said as he pushed his trolley, The Beast, carrying all his possessions through rural Lincolnshire.
‘Everything that I am and everything that I know is going to go away.’
British adventurer Karl Bushby pictured on his walk in Mexico in 2002. The 57-year-old started his global odyssey from Chile in November 1998 with the simple aim of becoming the first person to continuously circumnavigate the world on foot
Karl has trekked across South America, North America, Asia and Europe (tiktok.com/@karlcbushby/Press Association)
Karl paused with his trolley named The Beast near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, England, on Wednesday
But the prospect of stepping back into ordinary life is proving just as daunting as many of the obstacles he has faced along the way.
He told the BBC: ‘You’re going to have the old identity crisis, because Karl is this [an adventurer] and has been for half his life.
‘I will have to figure out who I am again. What is the meaning to it all? How do I find that meaning and purpose? How do I fill that hole I’m suddenly going to find myself in?’
Karl has been imprisoned, robbed, battled with terrible weather, monstrous terrain and the ministrations of polar bears. He’s swum 200 miles across the Caspian Sea and, in 2000, went into full military exercise mode in Colombia’s war-ravaged and jungle-choked Darien Gap, living on fish and coconuts for weeks.
The trek has taken the adventurer across South America, North America, Asia and Europe, spanning four of the world’s seven continents.
In total, he has covered an astonishing 50,000km (31,069 miles), the equivalent of running 10,000 5K races.
Along the way, Karl fell in love twice and suffered heartbreak twice. He enjoyed long-term relationships with a woman from Colombia and another from Japan, but neither could survive the demands of life on the road.
But while being tantalisingly close to his home in Hull, Karl shared his biggest fear is waking up in his childhood bed, with no savings, no pension and no real plan.
After years spent battling jungles, deserts and Arctic ice, Karl now finds himself adjusting to something far more unexpected – Britain and the version of Karl that lives in it
Karl pictured at a beach near Dover on October 5 after swimming the English Channel
‘I’m terrified. Very, very uncomfortable,’ he told Our News Outlet. ‘This has been my job, my life, my purpose for nearly 30 years.’
Remarkably, the epic odyssey that has consumed nearly three decades of Karl’s life was sparked not by a lifelong dream or profound soul-searching, but by a few pints and a challenge in the pub.
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‘It all started as a bit of a bet in the pub – a bit of banter,’ Karl said. A son of an SAS soldier, he and his peers revelled in seeing what their bodies could achieve.
‘It just sort of grew and grew. They said I couldn’t do it. I said I could. There was a bit of wanderlust, but it was also an element of wanting to prove something,’ he said.
‘And I have, and set some records along the way – things people said couldn’t be done.’
Such as navigating the Bering Straits – the 53-mile ice floe between Alaska and Russia, which he and French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer, whom he’d met in Alaska, crossed by swimming in the freezing waters in dry suits and then camping on slabs of ice at night.
Unsurprisingly, no one had ever crossed it without transport before.
Karl’s journey will come to a close on Monday when he reaches in childhood home in Hull, where his family will greet him
Karl walked through Chile in 1999, where he started his round-the-world trip
Karl pictured in the first decade of his challenge in Alaska in 2005
The previous year, a Danish team had failed after drifting nine miles off course and needing rescue when shifting ice trapped one of their members.
‘You pitch your tent on the biggest slab you can find, listen to the ice grinding all night and wake up on the edge of it,’ Karl said. ‘It’s the harshest environment on Earth, with polar bears thrown in for good measure.’
They made it across, only to end up not in a hot bath with a glass of red, but in a Russian detention centre.
Another first came with a 200-mile swim across the Caspian Sea after Iran closed its borders. Karl, Angela and two Azerbaijani national swimmers completed the crossing in just over a month, swimming two three-hour shifts a day and sleeping on support boats at night.
‘Funnily enough, no one had tried it before,’ he said.
But the most dangerous challenge was crossing the Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia during the Colombian civil war.
‘People were being murdered all the time and Colombia was the kidnap capital of the world, so we treated it like a military operation,’ he said.
Disguised as a vagrant, Karl travelled the first 200 miles before spending nearly three weeks in the jungle surviving on foraged food and using military escape-and-evasion tactics.
Then it was straight into police detention in Panama.
‘They had a few questions,’ he said. ‘But we got on very well.’
Yet after almost three decades on the road, there are no more borders left to cross and no more obstacles standing between Karl and home.
His mission is soon to come to a close with an embrace from his family on Monday.
This includes his 36-year-old son Adam, a 12-year-old granddaughter whom he will meet for the first time, his father and his brothers.
And waiting at the gate of the family home will be his mother Angela, who waved goodbye to her son 28 years ago and will finally be there to welcome him back.
READ MORE: The man who left his home in Hull in 1998 and has spent the last 28 years walking 30,000 miles round the world!
