He left Hull in 1998 to walk around the world. Now he is 400 km from his mum's front door

A man in a black wetsuit walked out of the sea onto Shakespeare Beach, just south of Dover, on Monday afternoon. His beard was grey. His hair stood up in wet spikes.

His name is Karl Bushby. The last time he stood on British soil, he was in his twenties and nobody owned a smartphone.

He is 57 now. He has spent the time in between walking. Not travelling. Walking. About 50,000 km through 29 countries, according to AFP, all of it on his own two feet.

"Feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years," he said on the beach. "It hasn't been easy, and that's part of the point."

His father Keith, a former SAS soldier, and his brothers were there to meet him. So was the German film director Werner Herzog, with a camera crew.

Bushby still has one job left. He has to walk around 400 km north, to his mother's house in Hull.

Who is Karl Bushby?

He grew up in Hull and joined the British Army. He served 12 years in the Parachute Regiment, according to The Hull Story.

He told the Big Issue he dreamed up the walk while bored in the army, waiting for a deployment that never came. He drew a line on a map. It ran from the tip of South America, up through the Americas, across Asia and Europe, and back to his front door.

Then came a bet in a bar that he could actually do it. "Suddenly, it became a challenge," he has said.

On 1 November 1998 he set off from Punta Arenas in southern Chile. He called it the Goliath Expedition. He had about $500, paper maps and a cart he later nicknamed "the Beast".

What are the rules of Karl Bushby's walk?

There are only two, and he has never broken them.

First, no transport of any kind to move forward. No cars, planes, trains, boats or even bikes. If he leaves the route for a visa or a break, he must restart from the exact spot where he stopped.

Second, he cannot go home until the line is complete.

That second rule is why his mum, Angela, has seen her son only three times since 1998. She once sent him money by Western Union when things got desperate. She has called herself his number one fan.

How did he cross the Bering Strait on foot?

By walking on the sea. In 2006, Bushby and French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer set out from Alaska across the frozen Bering Strait toward Siberia.

The ice moved under them for 14 days across a 241 km stretch, according to Explorersweb. Floes cracked apart. Winds pushed the pack around. His father later described the strait in winter as "a moving freight train of crushed and broken ice".

They made it. Bushby became one of the first people to cross the Bering Strait on foot. Then Russian border guards arrested them both for landing at an unofficial entry point.

Why was Karl Bushby banned from Russia?

Crossing the far east of Russia on foot takes a long time. Russian tourist visas only allow 90 days in every 180. Bushby kept running out of days.

In 2012 Russia refused him another visa. In 2013 it went further and gave him a five-year ban from entering the country.

His answer was to walk somewhere else. He walked about 4,800 km from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington DC as a protest. The ban was lifted in 2014. He went back to the exact spot where he had stopped and kept going.

He has needed that kind of stubborn streak more than once. Some people seem to make their own luck. Bushby mostly just refused to stop.

Did Karl Bushby really swim the Caspian Sea?

He did, and he does not even like swimming. "I'm definitely not a swimmer, nor do I like swimming," he told Explorersweb.

He could not get a visa for Iran, so the planned road was shut. The only way forward that did not break his rules was across the water.

In October 2024 he and fellow walker Angela Maxwell swam from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan. It took 32 days at sea, with 27 days of actual swimming, over about 288 km. They swam in three-hour sessions, morning and afternoon, and rested on a support boat at night.

From Azerbaijan he walked on into Turkey. On 2 May 2025 he crossed the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul. For the first time since 1998, he was standing in Europe.

Photo: Timitrius from Great Britain / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

How did he get across the English Channel?

The obvious route was the Channel Tunnel. Bushby asked to walk through its service tunnel. Eurotunnel said no, on safety and operational grounds.

"Even the Russians let me through," he said.

So it had to be a swim, again. That brought new trouble. French rules generally ban swims from France to Britain. "We thought we got permission to swim from the coast of France. Turned out that is not the case," he told AFP in September, standing near Cap Blanc-Nez.

He also had no illusions about his technique. "I swim like a cat dropped in a bathtub," he said. "It's not funny. It's bad."

After talks with French officials, he got the green light. He swam for about 20 hours over three days, stopping on a boat each night, and landed on Shakespeare Beach on 5 October.

Why did Karl Bushby's walk take 28 years instead of 12?

Life kept getting in the way. About 14 of the 28 years were spent stuck, according to AFP. Visa refusals. The 2008 crash, which wiped out his sponsorship. Covid.

Twice he ended up waiting in Mexico for years. From 2018 to 2022 he was stranded there by Iran visa problems and then the pandemic.

The danger was real too. He crossed the Darien Gap, the roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama, which took two months. He was held in Panama for 18 days.

Herzog's production company has backed him for 16 years and is making a documentary called Walk of Life. It is the kind of life story that, like John McAfee's wild ride, sounds made up until you check the dates.

What did Karl Bushby give up?

Almost everything. When he left, his son Adam was five years old, according to the Big Issue. Adam is now a grown man who has met his father only a few times.

Bushby fell in love twice on the road. Both times, he says, he ended it because the walk came first. "I've lost those relationships," he told the Big Issue.

He also admits he will come home broke. "I'm going to arrive home with nothing," he told AFP.

The internet has had its say. Clips of his landing at Dover have passed 4 million views. One fan summed it up: 28 years, 29 countries, and his finish line is still his mum's front door. Others joked that after seeing the state of Britain he might turn around and keep walking. One just hoped he would not get mauled by tigers on the last stretch.

When will Karl Bushby get home to Hull?

Soon. He has estimated he will finish on 1 November 2026, 28 years to the day after he took his first step in Chile.

That leaves about a month of walking up through England. No ice. No visas. No sea. Just roads he has not seen since the last century.

At the end of them is a house in Sutton Park, Hull. His mum, a retired factory worker, says she will be waiting at the gate.

She has her line ready. "Once I have given him a hug, I will say to him, 'What time do you call this, Karl?'" she told the Mirror.

He has his answer ready too. He told the Big Issue what he plans to say when he gets there. "Told you I could do it. Now, what's for tea?"

He has walked around the planet to say it. A few hundred kilometres to go.