After a 28-year odyssey spanning 29 countries, 36,000 miles, facing down polar bears, kidnappers and a spell in Russian custody, Karl Bushby was finally back in the arms of his long-suffering mother, Angela. Surrounded by television cameras and with a Sky News helicopter overhead, the 57-year-old was given a hero’s welcome as he completed his record-breaking voyage on foot from Punta Arenas in Chile, the southernmost city on the South American continent, to his home town of Hull on Monday. He finally crossed a misty Humber Bridge back to the city on Sunday – on the same date he set off in 1998.
In that time he has stuck by two simple rules: not to return home until he had fully completed his feat, and not to use transport to advance. In all, he walked 36,000 miles across four continents, a frozen sea, deserts, jungles and mountains. Quite a trek for a man not keen on walking.
His return on Monday will make Bushby the first person to have walked continuously across the world, visiting 29 countries, having already exceeded the record for the longest unbroken foot journey (far outstripping the 25,000-mile circumference of the world). The voyage took him across the frozen sea of the Bering strait between Alaska and Russia and across the notorious Darién Gap in Central America. He described last month how he had been threatened at gunpoint, faced down a polar bear, was convicted of being a spy, and been held in custody in Russia and sentenced to deportation.
Bushby strode into Queen Victoria Square like a modern folk hero, his passage only slowed by the dozens of people rushing to shake his hand and take photographs. Yet for a man who had navigated much of the planet, he did appear to get a little lost on his way through the crowds of his home city. Everybody point the way,” he said.
About three miles away, Angela, 75, was waiting at the gate of Bushby’s childhood home as she had promised. After a tearful embrace, they took a long look at each other. Earlier on a makeshift stage, Bushby thanked the city for his hero’s welcome.
There was a big team, the biggest team: Earth. It was a global effort.” At one point, the great German film-maker Werner Herzog appeared on stage alongside Bushby, overseeing what will surely be one of the closing scenes in Herzog’s documentary on the 28-year odyssey. Karl Turner, the Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull East, brought with him a message from the prime minister, Andy Burnham, who congratulated Bushby on his “truly remarkable” feat and thanked him for his service as a paratrooper.
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