Karl Bushby, a 56-year-old former British paratrooper, walked through the door of his mother's home in Hull, England, on Monday for the first time in 28 years, completing what organizers call the first continuous, unmotorized walk around the world.
Bushby set out from Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile, on Nov. 1, 1998, planning a roughly 12-year trek he called the Goliath Expedition. Estimates of the total distance vary by source, from about 31,000 to 36,000 miles, but accounts agree he crossed four continents and dozens of countries entirely on foot, refusing any motorized transport along the route.
A frozen crossing and a Russian standoff
The expedition's most perilous stretch came in March 2006, when Bushby and a companion, Dimitri Kieffer, walked roughly 150 miles across the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska into Russian Siberia — a 14-day detour over sea ice to avoid the open water separating the two continents. Russian border troops detained the pair near the village of Uelen for entering the country outside an official port, and Bushby spent years fighting travel bans and visa disputes with Russian authorities before being allowed to continue west into Europe. He also described run-ins with a polar bear and being held at gunpoint during the decades-long trip, according to the Yorkshire Post.
What Bushby expected to take about 12 years stretched to 28, delayed repeatedly by funding gaps, bureaucratic holdups and, at one stretch, months stranded in Mexico waiting for the money to keep walking.
He crossed the Humber Bridge into Hull on Monday to a crowd of well-wishers before walking the final few miles to his mother Angela's house. "Where have you been?" she joked when she opened the door, according to UPI. German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who has tracked the expedition over the years, was among those who turned out to greet him and is reportedly planning a documentary on the journey.
Bushby has said little publicly about what comes next, though those who greeted him in Hull described the scene as closer to a homecoming than a finish line — three decades after he first said goodbye.