Karl Bushby left his mother’s house in Hull, England, in 1998 with a plan to walk back to it, starting from the bottom of South America. Last week, 28 years and 31,000 miles later, he finally did.
The banner outside Angela Bushby’s terraced house said “Welcome Home Son.” When her son walked up to the door, pushing the cart that had carried his belongings across four continents, she hugged him and asked the obvious question.
“Where have you been?”
The answer would take quite a while. Bushby, a 57-year-old former British paratrooper, set out from Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile, on Nov. 1, 1998, with two rules: no transportation of any kind to move forward, and no going home until he had walked there. He was 29, and his marriage had just ended. His wife had moved to Northern Ireland with their young son.
He walked north through the Andes and hacked through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama. He crossed the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska into Russia. Years later, he swam roughly 184 miles across the Caspian Sea. When authorities would not let him walk through the Channel Tunnel, he swam the English Channel instead, about 20 hours in the water over three days, coming ashore near Dover on Oct. 5.
It was not 28 straight years of walking. Bushby told the BBC he spent about 15 of those years on foot, regularly heading back to Mexico to deal with visas, logistics, and sponsors. The 2008 financial crisis left him broke, and the pandemic stalled him too. He had not seen his mother since 2015.
On Monday, Nov. 2, 28 years and one day after he left, he crossed into Hull to a civic welcome and a crowd of hundreds. “For 28 years, 10,229 days, Hull has been waiting for your return,” Lord Mayor Maria Coward told him.
Then he walked the last stretch to his childhood home, where his mother was waiting, along with his son Adam, now 36, and his 12-year-old granddaughter, whom he had never met.
“They say it takes a village, but literally it took a world to get me here,” Bushby said. “I didn’t do this alone. There was a big team. The biggest team. Earth.”
Werner Herzog (@wernerherzogofficial) is making a documentary about the journey called Walk of Life, and Bushby plans to write a book and give talks. First, though, he has to relearn the place he started from.
“It’s almost like arriving in a foreign country,” he told CBS News. “I’ve worked with dollars for 28 years. I don’t know the brands in the stores.”
