TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS ON FOOT! Former paratrooper Karl Bushby set off from Punta Arenas, Chile, in November 1998, aged 29, to walk an unbroken path home to Hull in England. Now 57, he is on his final few miles, the BBC reports.
He set himself two rules and never broke them: no returning to the UK until the walk was done, and no transport to move forward. Along the way he hacked through the jungles of the Darién Gap, crossed the frozen Bering Strait (in 2006), and just weeks ago swam the English Channel to land near Dover. The total: about 36,000 miles across four continents.
Waiting at the finish: his 36-year-old son Adam, a 12-year-old granddaughter he has never met, his father and brothers, and his mother, at the gate of the childhood home he left 28 years ago.
It hasn’t been glamorous. Bushby says he spent only about 15 of those years actually walking; the rest went to visas, “dealing with geopolitics,” and Covid delays, often waiting it out in Mexico where living was cheap. “I’m dealing with the day-to-day stuff – punctures, just trying to find a place where you can wash your underwear,” he told the BBC. “It’s not as glorious as it looks.” Before sponsors and a book deal, he says he was a “penniless backpacker” living on donations and even food discarded by the roadside.
The scary part may be the finish line. “Everything that I am and everything that I know of me is going to go away,” he said. “I will have to figure out who I am again.”
His verdict on the planet after all those miles? “I personally have met the very best of humanity… The kindness of strangers made it all come together. I couldn’t have done it without the world.” And his first fish, chips and mushy peas in almost three decades? Nobody does it like the Brits, he says.
Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.
Source: BBC News
Leave a Reply