A 29-year-old former paratrooper left the southern tip of Chile in November 1998 with two rules: never use a motor to move forward, and don't go home until the entire route is done, unbroken. Last week, 57-year-old Karl Bushby pushed his battered gear cart through the streets of Hull, England, in front of hundreds of well-wishers, ending the Goliath Expedition after 28 years and more than 31,000 miles.
The original plan was optimistic — roughly 12 years. Reality had other ideas. Bushby crossed four continents and nearly 30 countries on foot, and the delays stacked up in the most dramatic ways possible. He trudged through the Darién Gap, the lawless jungle swathe between Colombia and Panama that defeats most travellers who attempt it. In 2006 he became the first person to walk across the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska into Russia — and then spent nearly a decade wrestling with Russian bureaucracy and Siberian winters, getting jailed twice along the way for illegal crossings.
Even the endgame refused to be simple. To keep his route unbroken around conflict zones like Ukraine, he swam the Caspian Sea over 31 days of open water. He then got permission from French authorities to swim the English Channel, coming ashore at Shakespeare Beach near Dover before walking the final 250 miles north to Hull. The last steps ended at his mother's house, where he reunited with her after a decade apart. By his own account, no one has ever completed an unbroken walking route of this scale around the planet.
The most striking part of the story isn't the mileage — it's what Bushby has said about finishing. Before arriving home he admitted that his purpose and reason for living were about to end, and that blending back into a society he no longer knew would be the hardest part. For anyone who has ever come back from a long trip feeling strangely adrift, imagine that feeling multiplied by 28 years.
Why should a traveller care? Partly for the sheer story, and partly for what's now on offer in Hull: artifacts, route logs and gear from the expedition go on public display in the city this week. If you're passing through East Yorkshire, it's a rare chance to see the actual kit — the cart, the equipment, the paperwork of a walk that took a lifetime.
Bushby's own summary of the achievement is worth remembering: "It took a world to get me here." Strangers, villagers, governments — he credits all of them. His gear cart is presumably retired; his legend isn't.
