The last leg was only about three miles, but Karl Bushby needed close to three decades to reach its starting line. On Monday the former paratrooper walked up to the family home in Hull, in northern England, where Angela Bushby, now 75, was standing at the gate exactly as the two had agreed long ago. Her first words were a tearful “Where have you been?”
The honest answer would take a while. Bushby began in Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile, on 1 November 1998, aged 29, with two rules he never broke: no motorised help to move forward, and no return to Britain until the job was done. Around 50,000 kilometres later, his route had taken him through the lawless Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, across the frozen Bering Strait in 2006 and, in October, through the waters of the English Channel, which he swam. Along the way he was detained in Russia and ordered to be deported.
He once expected the trip to last twelve years. By his own reckoning, actual walking filled roughly 15 years of that time, with visa battles, the global financial crash and the pandemic forcing long breaks, often spent in Mexico where life was cheap. He met relatives only rarely, and always abroad.
Hull turned out in force. Hundreds packed Queen Victoria Square, a local MP passed on warm words from Prime Minister Andy Burnham, and a visibly stunned Bushby called the reception unlike any homecoming ever. He credited “the biggest team – Earth” for getting him there. The emotional reunions had started on Sunday at the Humber Bridge, where his grown-up son Adam waited, along with a granddaughter, now 12, whom Bushby had never seen before.
German filmmaker Werner Herzog is following the final chapter for a documentary. Bushby himself is braced for a hard landing: after half a lifetime as the man who walks, he admits he now has to work out who he is when the walking stops.
