HULL, England — Karl Bushby completed his 28-year odyssey around the world on foot Monday by returning to his mother’s home in northern England. Bushby hugged his emotional mother, Angela, outside his townhouse in Hull, England, which he left in 1998.
They were surrounded by journalists, a documentary film crew and a large crowd outside the house who held up a banner saying “Welcome home, son.”
Bushby was a 29-year-old former paratrooper when he left home for a Royal Air Force base near Oxford and boarded a flight to South America. He came back at 57 – softer, grayer and older, but much more worldly.
“They say it takes a village, but literally it took a world to get me here,” Bushby said. “The kindness of strangers, both individuals and nation states, allowed me to return here today. I did not do this alone. There was a great team. The greatest team. Earth.”
Bushby departed from Punta Arenas, Chile, on November 1, 1998 and traveled 31,000 miles across four continents and 30 countries to return home. He navigated the shifting ice of the Bering Strait and swam across the Caspian Sea and the English Channel to avoid taking a boat or plane – or any other means of transport – to propel him forward.
On the final leg of the trip, helicopter footage showed Bushby surrounded by supporters as he pushed his trolley home after receiving a hero’s welcome earlier at City Hall.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he joked to the crowd gathered in the city center. “Is that it, it’s done?”
He craved adventure, but his mission only became clear when his father, Keith, sent him a birthday card in the mid-’90s. His father, himself an Army veteran, mentioned an argument among his Special Forces comrades over the possibility of walking from London to New York over the Bering Land Bridge, which some scientists believe was used by early humans to migrate from Asia to the Americas at a time when sea levels were high. lower.
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