A British adventurer who has walked around the world on a 28-year hike has finally reunited with his tearful mother.
Karl Bushby arrived back in his hometown of Hull after setting off on a 31,000-mile around-the-world trip in 1998 with the goal of returning home entirely on foot.
The media surrounded the former paratrooper for the emotional moment when he finally embraced his mom Angela at the gate of her home in England.
“28 years! I could not have imagined this,” said the 57-year-old.
“They say it takes a village, but it took a world to get me here—the kindness of strangers, so many, from individuals and nation states, to get me back here today.”
Pushing his cart heavy with equipment like medicine, sleeping bags, and a spare tire, Karl was flanked by local well-wishers as he walked the final three miles home.
On his record-breaking walk, Karl braved the infamous Darien Gap, a stretch of dense rainforest and mountainous terrain in South America, was arrested in Russia, and swam across the Caspian Sea, to finally return home.
Karl was welcomed “like a modern folk hero” by local officials and hundreds of well-wishers on November 2 at Hull’s Queen Victoria Square, where he addressed the crowds:
“After 28 years, you couldn’t ask for more than this – this is the last few steps to my mother’s house.”
He originally hoped to reach Hull in 2012, but years of setbacks, including arrests in Russia and visa issues, meant he had to take breaks from his journey.
Earlier this year he was dealt another blow as he neared the finish line. He would be forced to face the prospect of swimming across the English Channel after being told he couldn’t use the Channel Tunnel to get from France to England.
GetLink, the operators of the tunnel, denied his formal request to walk through the service tunnel adjacent to the 31-mile long Channel Tunnel, saying (rather absurdly) that it would pose a safety risk if he were allowed to walk it.
According to Karl’s own rules, he cannot use any form of mechanized transport, including ferries.
Last year, Karl swam more than 170 miles across the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan to avoid entering Iran or Russia.
It took him a whole month to swim and, looking ahead, he joked that he would rather consider taking hostages if it meant avoiding having to swim the Channel.
“I’m just not into the swim thing,” he said, especially because the English Channel is a wholly different stretch of water, and much colder.
But he persevered, swimming across the channel last month, spending 20 hours in the water over three days, resting on a safety vessel at night and returning to his last-known coordinates each morning, until he landed at Shakespeare Beach near Dover.
Records Set During His 28-Year Walk
• Longest Unbroken Foot Journey: He is recognized for completing the longest unbroken foot journey in history, covering more than 31,000 miles across 30 countries—surpassing the Earth’s circumference by roughly 6,000 miles.
• World’s First Bering Strait Crossing on Foot: In 2006, he and fellow adventurer Dimitri Kieffer made the first recorded crossing of the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia on foot and swimming through ice floes.
Back in his old neighborhood, Karl gave his mother a tearful embrace, and they gazed at one another for the first time in nearly 3 decades.
“You’ve changed a bit,” Bushby told her. “I’m older,” she replied. “Well done for hanging in there.”
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