‘It’s a big moment,” says Karl Bushby, who has had plenty of big moments in his life. He is recording himself on his phone for social media. “We’re in Dover, and I’m about to have my first fish and chips and mushy peas in 28 years. Mushy peas, my God, I forgot they even existed!” He points his phone at the plate in front of him. “It better be good.” And he tucks in. “Mmmm. See, this is a big chunk of fish and a decent bit of batter, and that’s something you don’t see in other parts of the world. I mean, come on! That. Is. Fish. And. Chips! You see, Britain is special.”
It has been two days since Bushby swam the Channel to return to England. Tomorrow, he’ll start the walk home to Hull for the first time since he left in 1998. He hopes to get back on 1 November, the same date he set off all those years ago.
Although Bushby is a man of military precision, timing is not one of his greatest traits. When the former paratrooper left the army, aged 29, to walk the world, he planned to be home 12 years later. What accounted for the extra years? “The real world. You can’t account for financial crises, pandemics, visa bans, wars and the bureaucracy you have to deal with. It took 28 years because of the rules and because we refused to compromise on the route.” I ask what he means by “we”? He smiles. “It’s the royal we. Me and the Beast.”
Ah, the Beast. That’s the customised golf trolley he travelled with, containing essential survival equipment, camping supplies, electronics and food. The original Beast lasted three years before it broke down and had to be put out to grass. The Beast 2, an upgrade he built in Nicaragua, has survived 25 years.
Rather than circumnavigating the globe, which is impossible without transport, Bushby decided to walk about as far as he possibly could. As his starting point he chose the southernmost city on the South American continent, Punta Arenas in Chile (53 deg S), and planned to make his way across the Americas, Asia and Europe back to his home town, Hull (which is, at 53 deg N, the latitudinal mirror image of Punta Arenas). He was guided by two simple self-made rules: he could use no transport to advance, and there was no going home until he arrived on foot, mission completed. If he had to make a detour or pause his trip, by force or by choice, he would use transport, but always restart at the exact spot where he had stopped.
Bushby has walked approximately 36,000 miles (58,000km), breaking the record for the longest unbroken foot journey and far exceeding the 25,000-mile circumference of the world. When he gets home he will be the first person to have walked continuously across the world, visiting 29 countries. En route, he broke other records (as part of the first teams to complete the crossing of the Bering Strait, from Alaska to Russia, on foot in modern times, and to swim the Caspian Sea, from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan). He has also almost died, spent years stuck in Mexico because he lost his sponsor, been convicted of being a spy, been held in custody in Russia and sentenced to deportation, been threatened at gunpoint and faced the prospect of predation by a polar bear. To many he’s a hero. To some, he’s a reckless chancer.
We meet at the White Horse in Dover, its walls graffitied with the times people have taken to swim the Channel. Bushby looks at them and says they show what an amateur he is. It took him 20 hours over three days to swim the 21 miles (34km) on his back. “There’s one over there who did it in 10 hours. Swimmers normally go twice the speed I did. Real swimmers are in trunks, caps and a pair of goggles. I’ve got a wetsuit, fins, paddles for my hands, a flotation vest, neck flotation. I don’t call what I do swimming, out of respect to real swimmers. I call it ‘floatimming’.”
Bushby looks fit in the way that people who take regular constitutionals do. His face is tanned from the sun and the wind; his hair is still blond, his eyes sea blue. But he is also very different from the man who set out three decades ago. At 29, Bushby was skinny with shoulder-length hair – a dead ringer for Kurt Cobain. Once the media started reporting on his “Goliath expedition”, a joke/conspiracy theory went round that the former Nirvana frontman wasn’t really dead, he was just walking the world using the pseudonym Karl Bushby.
Today, at 57, he is strong, with a bone-crunching handshake, a fuller face and a hint of middle-aged spread. He says people don’t expect him to look the way he does. They either imagine him as Gandalf, with a white beard down to his knees, or as a ripped athlete. “Everyone’s saying: if he’s been walking 28 years, why does he look so fat? But most of the time I’m eating out of gas stations, burger bars, sitting somewhere for three months waiting for a visa, getting older, eating biscuits and cookies.”
He has brought along a friend, Angela Maxwell, a 44-year-old American who spent six and a half years walking the world, some of it alongside Bushby. She also swam the Caspian Sea with him over 31 days in 2024, accompanied by Anastasia Boborykina and Abdurrahman Rustamov, two young Azerbaijani champion swimmers.
Maxwell tells me that in many ways she and Bushby are different, but they are similar in important ways. “We’re both introverts, even hermits in some way. We like our autonomy.” Maxwell is a funny and talkative introvert. Bushby is a more conventional introvert – quiet, understated, dry.
Bushby grew up in a military family. His father, Keith, is an SAS veteran who spent 24 years in the British army, and his younger brother, Adrian, is also an army man. His mother, another Angela, worked in a factory.
School, Bushby says, was a “living hell”. Dyslexic (though undiagnosed), he was branded as “thick”, and found solace in birdwatching. He left school at 16 with no qualifications and joined the junior Parachute regiment. But he struggled with the physical demands, and took five attempts to pass the gruelling P Company training before eventually joining the 3rd battalion of the Parachute regiment. Some mocked him for his repeated failures, but others were impressed by his tenacity. “Normally, they’ll allow you two or three attempts.” Why did he get five? “Because I wouldn’t quit … that was probably one of the first signs. I just won’t let go. I’m a bit of a rottweiler.”
Bushby remained an outsider in the paras, not least because he didn’t like booze. “I was never a beer drinker. And that’s very bad news in the army. Very difficult. It can be a problem.” Throughout his military career, he felt his peers didn’t trust or respect him.
In his early 20s, stationed in Northern Ireland, he married a Belfast woman, yet another Angela. Five years later, when they were living in Hampshire, they divorced. She returned home to Belfast with their young son, Adam. At the time, servicemen were only allowed into Northern Ireland if they were serving there, so Bushby was effectively separated from Adam.
There was another thing gnawing away at him. A professional, or existential, crisis. The world was at peace, which was catastrophic for those who had joined the military hoping to see action. Between 1990 and 1995, the British army was downsized from 160,000 to 120,000. Bushby kept his job, but he was bored and restless. “We were not being used. There was nothing going on. I was one of those guys looking for other challenges in life. We were all disillusioned because of the lack of action – the “peace disease”, as the Chinese refer to it. It’s hard to keep an army in combat fighting conditions when there’s nothing to do. As young soldiers, you’re up for the fight, and you end up in Northern Ireland on sentry on a gate every day. It’s not very appealing.”
Ever since childhood, he had wanderlust, a longing for new horizons. “I used to dream about great big journeys on foot. I started drawing lines on maps, and the conversation spread between friends.” Had he ever done a big journey before? “No! Nothing.”
In his mid-20s, he got a birthday card from his father that mentioned a group of SAS soldiers who were discussing the possibility of walking from London to New York. That was an epiphany, Bushby says. There was a map on the wall, and he took a black marker pen and drew a line from the UK to Europe, through Asia, over the Bering Strait. Then he thought: why stop in New York? So he extended the line down to the bottom of the Americas. He knew there were a few obstacles, but as far as he was concerned, the whole world was connected if he could get over the Bering Strait. Not that he knew what the Bering Strait was, or that nobody had successfully crossed it in modern times, since it had broken down into treacherous blocks of ice. (Some scientists believe Paleo-Indian people may have crossed from Siberia into Alaska 17,000 years ago, when ocean levels were lower.)
For the next couple of years Bushby studied the route, working out how his dream could be turned into a reality. It meant swotting up on the subjects he’d flunked at school – maths, physics and geography. The more he studied, the more he told people he was going to do it. “Nobody took it seriously when I said I wanted to walk around the world. It was like, ‘Karl just had this crazy batshit idea of spending 12 years walking around the world. Yeah, whatever!’ That was the response from everybody, and that fuelled the fire. But I would look at the map, and think of what kind of life that would be. I couldn’t let go of that.”
He was also motivated by poor mental health. He was a keen distance runner, and if he went a single day without running, he suffered anxiety attacks. It got so bad that he saw a behavioural psychologist. “It dominated my life. It really did.”
Perhaps the biggest motivation of all was an overwhelming sense of his own mortality. “I took death seriously. You’re dying, you’ve got one life, and what are you going to do with it? That really resonated with me.”
Once Bushby had made up his mind, he accepted that he would never see his son growing up. If everything went to plan, Adam would be 20 when he got back (as it is, he is 36).
“That was a difficult decision,” Bushby says. “But the way I squared that circle was, ‘How would I be worth something to my son?’ Would I be worth more to him by doing something on this scale?’” He doesn’t sound wholly convinced by his argument.
On 1 November 1998, Bushby set off from his mother’s house. He flew to Chile, hitching a lift to the Falkland Islands on an RAF military transport flight. From there, he took a short civilian flight to cross over to his official starting point in Punta Arenas, Chile. He set off from there with $500 (then equal to about £300) of savings and the Beast, speaking no Spanish, and was met immediately with a ferocious environment on the Patagonian steppe. Hurricane-force winds were raging. The freezing gales forced him to lean at a 45-degree angle just to stay on his feet, for days at a time, while dust and grit pelted his face. He experienced suffocating altitude sickness, breathing difficulties and starvation.
Bushby soon realised that pushing his way across the wind-lashed, bone-dry plateau was a death sentence. He altered his route to cross the Andes and headed west towards the coast. The terrain was still hostile (at one point he survived on one banana for three days), but he began to meet people who transformed his view of humanity. When he needed warmth or food or simply contact, they provided it.
“There are so many examples out there. Where would we be without some of the help we’ve had? Just the simple stuff. You’ll find people living in shacks on the side of the road built with car parts – hoods and doors taped together. These people are just scratching out an existence, but they’ll give you a bowl of rice and water.”
By now he was beginning to speak Spanish, but often he didn’t even exchange a word with those who helped him. “I was walking through the Atacama desert in Chile. You’ve got one main highway, Route 5, so the truckers and coach dri…
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