Meet the man who left his home in Hull in 1998 and has spent the last 28 years walking 30,000 miles round the world! As he nears his final stretch, JANE FRYER joins him and his trust trolley he's pushed across continents

On October 1, 1998, Karl Bushby set off on a mission from his home on the Sutton Park Estate in Hull, to walk 30,000 miles around the world.

He was 29 years old with sandy hair, a soft voice and gentle smile and, after three years of planning and logistics, had set himself two rules. He could not use any transport to progress his journey. And he could not, under any circumstances, return to the UK until he had completed his mission.

Just before he set off, he spoke to a local TV reporter.

‘What makes sense to me might not make sense to other people,’ he said. ‘I just don’t want to grow old, sitting there one day, looking back with regret, and thinking, “if only”.’

So he hugged his nan goodbye outside his childhood home. And his weeping mum Angela. Waved goodbye to a clutch of friends and neighbours and the camera team, and strode off in his camel-coloured jacket, pushing a specially adapted trolley filled with everything he’d need – tent, sleeping bag, maps, instant coffee – at a brisk 5km an hour to Heathrow.

From there he flew to the southernmost tip of Chile and started walking. Up through Patagonia and the Pacific side of the South American Andes, up the West Coast of the United States. On to the Alaskan highway through Canada. Due west over Alaska toward the Seward Peninsula. Across the frozen, treacherous Bering Strait and into Russia. Then eventually into Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan, along the Silk Road, a swim in the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan. Then Georgia, Turkey and Europe.

‘It was always going to take 12 years, plus a bit,’ Karl, now 57, told me this week. But flexibility ‘turned out to be a big plus, because there’s always a lot you can’t foresee’.

Such as the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out all his funding and sponsorship for three years. And the pandemic – another three-year delay. Visa bans – which meant a 3,000-mile diversion to the Russian embassy in Washington DC to plead for a visa (‘Amazingly, it worked’) and global politics.

Karl Bushby in Montenau, Belgium with the Daily Mail's Jane Fryer

Karl pictured in Belgium – some 500 miles and just a month or so’s journey from Hull

Karl’s journey overran by 16 years and has been extremely eventful. He’s been imprisoned, robbed, battled with terrible weather, monstrous terrain and encounters with polar bears. He’s swum 186 miles across the Caspian Sea and, in 2000, went into full military exercise mode in Colombia’s war-ravaged and jungle-choked Darien Gap, living on fish and coconuts for weeks.

But now he is tantalisingly close to the UK, it seems his biggest fear is waking up in his childhood bed with no savings, no pension and no real plan. ‘I’m terrified. Very, very uncomfortable,’ he says. ‘This has been my job, my life, my purpose for nearly 30 years.’

I meet Karl in Belgium – some 500 miles and just a month or so’s journey from Hull – and as we stride through the sunny countryside, he tells endless stories of the joys of life on the road, the people, their endless kindnesses, the very close shaves and the nightmarish logistics he and his teeny support team of four – which includes his fellow adventurers and, to start with, Karl’s dad – have had to overcome along the way.

And, also, how he’d never expected the 21-mile-wide English Channel to cause such a bloody headache. ‘We’d always assumed we’d be able to use the service tunnel for Eurotunnel, and I’d just walk through it. But that wasn’t to be,’ he says. ‘So I realised I’d have to swim it, which I can’t say I’m too excited about.’

To complicate matters, French law forbids swimming the Channel from France due to safety concerns. But last week he secured special permission. And a support boat. And he’ll swim it in stages with his friend Angela Maxwell, a fellow long-distance walker.

‘It’s all taken so long there’s no time to train – so we’ll just turn up, hope the wetsuits fit and head off,’ he says.

After that, there’s just the final stretch back up to Hull, where he hopes to arrive on November 1.

Karl’s is such an epic journey and has been going on for so long – when he left Tony Blair was just settling into Downing Street and the Good Friday Agreement had just been signed – that it’s hard to know where to start.

Karl sat in the middle of the road in Nevada, USA, in 2003 during his 28 year round the world walk 

Karl crossed the Bering Strait – the 53-mile ice floe between Alaska and Russia with French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer by swimming in the freezing waters in dry suits

Karl started his journey in Chile where he pushed around a trolley called The Beast

So perhaps better to ask why. Why on earth would anyone want to spend nearly 30 years pushing their worldly goods around the globe in a trolley called The Beast, in between wild camping and never knowing where the next meal, or hurdle, is coming from.

‘It all started as a bit of a bet in the pub – a bit of banter,’ says Karl. A former paratrooper, he and his peers revelled in seeing what their bodies could achieve.

‘It just sort of grew and grew. They said I couldn’t do it. I said I could. There was a bit of wanderlust, but it was also an element of wanting to prove something,’ he says. ‘And I have, and set some records along the way – things people said couldn’t be done.’

Such as navigating the Bering Strait – the 53-mile ice floe between Alaska and Russia, which he and French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer, whom he’d met in Alaska, crossed in March 2006 by swimming in the freezing waters in dry suits and then camping on slabs of ice at night. Unsurprisingly, no one had ever fully crossed it without transport before.

‘You pitch your tent in the middle of the biggest piece of ice, listen to the ice grinding and moving all night and in the morning wake up right on the edge,’ he says. ‘It’s the harshest environment humans can find themselves in – with polar bears thrown in for fun.’

But they made it – straight into a Russian detention centre.

Another first was the 186-mile swim across the Caspian Sea, which seemed the only option when Iran closed its borders to him. Karl swam it with Angela Maxwell and two Azerbaijani national swimmers in two three-hour sessions a day, resting and sleeping on support boats at night. It took just over a month.

‘Funnily enough, no one had tried it before,’ he says drily.

But the scariest bit was crossing the Darien Gap, the expanse of dense tropical forest that separates Panama from Colombia, in the middle of civil war in 2000.

Karl swam across the Caspian Sea in 2024 when Iran closed its borders to him

‘People were getting murdered all the time and Colombia was the kidnap centre of the world, so we treated it like a military operation and spent two months planning,’ he says. The first 200 miles were along a heavily contested road. So Karl posed as a vagrant, his hair and skin dyed, his clothes rags and all his kit in tatty old sacks.

Next it was four days floating down a river, then nearly three weeks in the jungle practising escape and evasion military tactics, foraging for food.

‘Here I was down to a backpack and combat vest, with maps, a compass, medicine and a survival fishing kit all woven into the seams of my clothes,’ he says.

Then straight into police detention in Panama for a few weeks.

‘They had a few questions…’ he says. ‘But we got on very well.’

Karl’s stories are riveting and riotous but are also most people’s worst nightmare. The time he accidentally sliced through the artery on his left wrist and nearly bled out as the blood jetted and frothed while he stitched himself up in Peru. The time he collapsed, exhausted in the snow in the Arctic and could feel himself drifting off to sleep and certain death, before a surge of adrenaline roused him.

But he never thought of giving up. ‘It’s a mindset. A certainty,’ he explains. It was the same utter focus – or, perhaps, bloody-mindedness – that saw him join the Parachute Regiment aged 16, after five attempts.

‘Nobody is allowed to try five times, so they must have seen something in me,’ he says. ‘But I had no qualifications, nothing else to fall back on.’

Because while Karl was from an Army family – his dad was in the SAS – he wasn’t an obvious candidate. He was slight, dyslexic, loved bird-watching and the outdoors and, according to his 78-year-old mum, was ‘the warmest, most loving little boy’.

Pictured: Karl covered in snow and ice in Turkey in 2025 during his walk across the world

He was also badly bullied at school. ‘I was easy prey. I was punched and hit.’ Today, Karl is wonderfully wry and gentle company, but he is clearly made of steel. Not just when it comes to walking for weeks, months and years in often terrible conditions.

‘The heat on the California-Arizona border! When it reaches 50 degrees centigrade, the nosebleeds and fainting are a good indication it’s time to stop walking. But I’d take the heat over the cold any day,’ he says. ‘The Arctic is just trying to kill you, constantly.’

He also displays a different type of endurance. Such as constantly scrabbling for sponsors. Writing the 2005 book Giant Steps and giving talks and making social media content about his ‘Goliath Expedition’ to raise money. Watching his financial backers evaporate in 2008 before his current team of fellow adventurers stepped in two years later, with plans for a documentary directed by Werner Herzog, of Grizzly Man fame.

And the whole thing has taken an extra 16 years, for goodness’ sake. Hasn’t it driven him mad?

‘I get frustrated, but I’ve always had confidence that things will change. And I wasn’t exactly rushing back to anything. This is my life,’ he says. ‘Most of the time, it’s all quite mundane – like a job. So this is my Monday morning in the office – walking in the sun, rain, ice.’

Thankfully, we’re walking in blazing sunshine. Heading northwest from the small town of St Vith in Belgium, edging towards Calais, 230 miles away, tracking our progress on a map app on his smartphone.

Karl has had an instant coffee and a single yoghurt for breakfast, and is pushing the 150lb Beast in a neatly mended T-shirt and shorts at a pace so steady he could be a metronome.

Today, like most days, he’ll walk for at least 20 miles, before grabbing something to eat – ‘anything available, I’m not fussy’ – and then ‘stealth’ camp wherever he can pitch his small black-out tent.

Pictured: Karl pushing his trolley on a road in snowcovered Russia in 2016 

He tells me he never stretches. ‘I’m quite old school. I don’t really bother with any of that,’ he says. But he has noticed a few changes to his body over the past 28 years.

He’s lost count of the number of toenails that have fallen off – ‘they just go black and fall off’ – his six pack has gone rather soft and his knees are playing up. ‘It’s definitely time to get this done now,’ he says. Perhaps also because his ‘mission’ has come at great personal cost.

Karl has fallen ‘properly in love’ twice during his trip, but both relationships ultimately faltered under pressures from visas and the pandemic.

‘You move on and those are rough times. The hardest thing about doing this has been those relationships,’ he says quietly.

His family must have had a tough time of it, too.

When he left home, Karl was divorced from his wife Angela, and their son Adam was seven years old. Now Adam has a daughter, aged 11, whom Karl has never met.

He reckons he’s seen his mum, dad and son about four times since he left – ‘they’ve managed to come out’ – but not for the last 13 years, though they’re in regular contact on Facebook Messenger. ‘[Mum] sends me a lot of articles from the internet – I think she thinks I don’t have any access!’ he laughs.

But what if someone got ill – would he ever bend his self-imposed rules? ‘No,’ he says very firmly. ‘They understood that if they died I wouldn’t be there. So it was up to them to stay alive and they’ve managed to do that!’

The adventurer pictured here in Ecuador in 2000 - it would take him another 26 years to come home

Something his mother, Angela, tells me she completely understood. ‘I told him not to come home if anything happened to me. But I just didn’t think it would take quite so long,’ she says.

When he arrives in Hull, she will be waiting at the garden gate. ‘It doesn’t finish until he gets back home so that’s where I’ll be waiting,’ she says firmly.

While Karl is clearly nervous at the thought of ‘what next?’, there are things in the pipeline. The Herzog documentary is scheduled for the end of the year. He has already set up a non-profit organisation to help promote STEM subjects in schools.

But most of all, he wants to spread the news of what he’s learned as he’s walked on and on.

‘I want to keep reminding people that the world is an amazing and incredible place full of kind people,’ he says.

‘With the 24-hour news cycle, it’s too easy to forget that and live in fear. But my mission has given me hope because at the ground level, everywhere, people are wonderful.’

Gosh, what a truly exceptional man Karl Bushby is. But nearly three decades since he set out as a 29-year-old, does he have any regrets? ‘No,’ he says very firmly. ‘I wouldn’t change a thing. Not a single thing. I’m nearly home. It worked.’