English dad spends nearly three decades walking across the world
In 1998, English dad Karl Bushby went for a walk that would take him across four continents and last 28 years. Read all about his amazing journey before he made it back to his mother’s door
READING LEVEL: GREEN
Imagine taking a 28-year-long walk around the world. That’s exactly what British adventurer Karl Bushby has just done.
Mr Bushby finally made it back to his mother’s doorstep in Northern England on Monday local time after trekking his way across four continents.
The former British paratrooper, now 57, threw his arms around his tearful mum, Angela, on the pavement outside her modest row house in Hull, the same home he strolled away from back in 1998.
A “Welcome Home, Son” banner hung over the scene as reporters, onlookers and a documentary crew jammed the street, the New York Post reported.
“They say it takes a village but literally it took a world to get me here,” Mr Bushby told the crowd.
“The kindness of strangers, so many, from individuals to nation states, to get me back here today. I didn’t do this alone. There was a big team. The biggest team. Earth.”
Naturally, Mr Bushby finished on foot, hiking across the Humber Bridge into his hometown.
Crossing the Humber Bridge into East Yorkshire, he was greeted by his father, his brothers, his 36-year-old son Adam and his 12-year-old granddaughter, whom he was meeting for the very first time, the BBC reported.
On Monday, he pulled into Queen Victoria Square in central Hull around 11am, where hundreds packed a civic ceremony to greet him.
Mr Bushby got the idea to walk around the world from a card he received from his dad.
In the mid-1990s, Keith Bushby, himself an army veteran, passed along a debate among his special forces pals over whether a man could hoof it from London to New York by way of the Bering land bridge*, an ancient crossing some scientists believe early humans used to reach the Americas when seas ran lower.
Mr Bushby, who logged 12 years with the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, quit the Army in late 1997 after a difficult divorce and was looking for a challenge.
“I had something to prove to my paratrooper mates,” he told Backpacker magazine.
He set two unbreakable rules: no vehicle could ever carry him forward, and he couldn’t go home until his own two feet could get him there.
At 29, he hopped a flight from a Royal Air Force base outside Oxford to the bottom of South America and started walking from Punta Arenas, Chile, on November 1, 1998, reportedly carrying less than the equivalent of US $1000.
He estimated the trip would take roughly five years – but he was very wrong.
“You just dump a whole bucket full of reality on that,” he said. “We suspected that it was 12 years plus. And the plus was a big plus. But never in our wildest dreams would we ever have imagined 28 years.”
Mother Nature threw everything she had at him along the way.
In 2001, he slipped past armed conflict in the Darién Gap*, the brutal, road-free stretch of jungle and mountains linking the Americas, only to land behind bars in Panama for 18 days after wandering into a restricted border zone.
In 2006, he and American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer tackled the 90km frozen Bering Strait*.
They had to be rescued by air, regrouped, faced-off with a polar bear, nearly drowned in frigid* water and watched their sleds and supplies nearly vanish into the sea. Their reward for pulling it off was being arrested in Russia for illegal entry and being threatened with deportation*.
But paperwork, not peril, proved his toughest foe. Russia ate up nearly a decade, as visa headaches piled up and the weather allowed only a few months of walking a year.
When Moscow refused him a visa in 2012, he marched from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington in protest, which eventually got him the documents.
The Kremlin* later hit him with a five-year entry ban in 2013, forcing a detour through Mongolia and China, a week-long swim across the Caspian Sea to Baku and, finally, a push into Europe last year.
The last hurdle was water. The Channel Tunnel’s operator refused his request to walk its service passage*, so the self-described weak swimmer, who once said he paddled “like a cat dropped in a bathtub,” reluctantly dived in.
On October 5, he staggered onto Shakespeare Beach, south of Dover, after about 20 hours of swimming spread over three days, with his father and brothers waiting on the sand. He’d quietly cleared the crossing with French and British officials and both coastguards beforehand.
“It feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years,” he told The Post. “It hasn’t been easy, and that’s part of the point.”
His roughest stretches?
“Lots of different hard parts, but let’s say the Darien Gap and Alaska,” he said.
His favourite scenery was in South America, especially Colombia, Chile and the parched Atacama Desert*.
“It’s kept me in shape,” he said. “There are some aches and pains, but anyone who’s (going to) be 57 and above, and is physically active, is probably (going to) be the same.”
Mr Bushby told The Post he had no regrets.
“It worked, so no, I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.
However, he had some work to do reconnecting with his son Adam, who was just eight when he left.
Adam now lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has a family of his own. He told the Yorkshire Post that his father’s return “doesn’t seem real.”
“(I am) looking forward to reconnecting with everyone. There’s distance between us, and we need to patch that up and move on,” Mr Bushby told The Post a few weeks before he completed his journey.
But after three decades of strangers feeding and sheltering him, his takeaway was simple.
“People are amazing, despite what we think the world looks like,” he said. “Humanity is worth the effort.”
This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced here with permission
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GLOSSARY
- Bering land bridge: a vast, low-lying land mass that connected Asia and North America in the Pleistocene Ice Ages
- Darién Gap: a dangerous and remote strip of rainforest, swamp and mountains on the border between Colombia and Panama
- frigid: extremely cold
- deportation: forcibly sent back to the country he came from
- Kremlin: the seat of Russian power
- Bering Strait: rising temperatures and melting glaciers flooded the Bering land bridge about 11,000 years ago, which created the Bering Strait, which is a roughly 85 km strait of water between Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska and Cape Dezhnev in Siberia that freezes over during winter
- service passage: the strip of land that makes up the tunnel
- Atacama Desert: a desert in Chile, recognised as the driest non-polar desert in the world
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QUICK QUIZ
1. In what year did Karl Bushby leave home on his grand adventure?
2. How old was he when he returned home?
3. What made him want to walk around the world?
4. How long did he initially think it would take?
5. What were some of the challenges he experienced on the way?
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CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
1. What’s your amazing adventure?
Karl has completed an amazing adventure. What would be the most amazing adventure that you would love to do? Describe this in writing. Don’t forget to include what you think the biggest challenges could be and how you plan to overcome them.
Time: Spend at least 20 minutes on this activity
Curriculum Links: English, Health and Physical Education
2. Extension
What advice would you give Karl and his son Adam to help them to reconnect after the 28 year walk? Write a list of tips. Next to each tip, write sentences explaining how this will help.
Time: Spend at least 20 minutes on this activity
Curriculum Links: English, Health and Physical Education
VCOP ACTIVITY
What happens next?
Imagine the full story turns out to be in three parts and this article is only Part One. Think about what the rest of the story could be and write the next two parts that tell the rest of this story.
Time: allow 30 minutes to complete this activity
Curriculum Links: English, Critical and Creative Thinking