Hodao 28 godina do kuće: Šta je Karl Bušbi naučio na najdužem putu

British adventurer Karl Bushby (57) arrived today, November 2, in his hometown of Hull, England, bringing to an end the incredible journey he began 28 years ago at the southern tip of Chile. In one of the most unusual adventures in the world, he covered tens of thousands of kilometers, facing extreme weather, dangerous terrain, and countless obstacles.

“Is that it? Is it done?” he joked on a stage in Queen Victoria Square, in front of several hundred people, many of them former soldiers. He looked like a man who could not believe he had really arrived.

That question was not just a joke. According to ExplorersWeb, of the expedition’s first 26 years, about 13 were spent actually walking. The rest went to visas, money, a pandemic, and waiting.

Two Rules and One House

A former paratrooper with the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, Bushby set out on November 1, 1998, from Punta Arenas with a plan to walk to his mother’s house in Hull in 12 years. He had only two rules: use no transportation of any kind on the route itself, and do not go home until he was done. Breaks were not forbidden, so after each one he resumed exactly where he had stopped. British media reported that he started with a budget of just £280.

The rules seemed simple. In fact, they became a system in which every obstacle demanded a workaround that did not violate their letter.

Jungle, Ice, and a Passport

The first big test was the Darién, the jungle between Colombia and Panama. The crossing took two months and included 18 days of detention in Panama. He reached Alaska in 2005, and in March 2006, with Frenchman Dimitri Kieffer, he crossed the frozen Bering Strait: 14 days over broken, constantly shifting ice. The Russians detained them for failing to enter through an official border crossing.

That was where the pattern began that would mark the rest of the journey. His tourist visa allowed him no more than 90 days in every 180 in Russia, so he had to keep leaving the country. After 2008, he lost his sponsors and spent years waiting in Mexico. When he was refused a visa in 2012 and handed a five-year ban in 2013, he did something few would have thought of: he walked 4,800 kilometers from Los Angeles to the Russian embassy in Washington in protest. The ban was lifted in 2014. A petition signed with shoe soles.

Loopholes in the Rules

Next came Mongolia, the Gobi with camels (the group fell apart after 1,130 kilometers), and China, then Central Asia. The road stalled at Iran, where no visa was forthcoming, and then the pandemic arrived. Bushby waited it out in Mexico, where he spent most of his breaks over the years. The rules do not forbid waiting somewhere else, only covering any part of the route by vehicle.

The solution was unexpected for a man who had spent years only walking. In October 2024, with Angela Maxwell, he swam 288 kilometers across the Caspian Sea, from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan. They swam three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon over 32 days, 27 of which were swimming days, and slept on support boats. Bushby admitted he was not a swimmer. British media add that he once joked he would rather take hostages than swim the English Channel.

That is exactly what happened. Eurotunnel refused his request to walk through the service tunnel, since closing it for 15 hours or more would endanger safety and maintenance. France does not allow swimming the Channel from France toward Britain. Bushby swam it anyway, in a wetsuit and in several stages, and came ashore at a beach near Dover in early October. For the first time in 28 years, he stood on British soil.

The European stretch is also interesting for readers in the region. After Istanbul, where he was exceptionally allowed to cross the July 15 Martyrs Bridge over the Bosphorus on foot, he went through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Slovakia, Germany, Belgium, and France. Because of the Schengen 90-days-in-180 rule, he twice had to fly to Mexico from the middle of Europe and come back. The same rule applies to every traveler from the region.

Home

In Hull, his mother was waiting, along with the house he left and his son Adam, who was eight when his father went away. They rarely saw each other, and Adam only briefly joined him on his walk across the United States in 2014. A few months ago, Bushby said he feared he would not recognize the country: he left when Tony Blair was prime minister, and since then more than five governments have come and gone.

He thanked everyone who helped him, from ordinary people to states, saying the whole journey was possible only with other people’s help. What began as a personal adventure ended as a shared undertaking.

The hardest rule of the expedition was written nowhere: knowing when to stop.