I was reading about Karl Bushby in The Week, and there’s something wonderfully absurd about setting off for a walk home which takes nearly three decades. Most of us would consider it a fairly serious planning error if a journey took more than twice as long as expected.
Bushby turned it into a life. Having left Chile in 1998, he travelled through the Americas, across to Russia and onwards towards Britain. The distances are extraordinary, but what interested me most was what he came back thinking about other people.
A project bigger than the plan
His official expedition website describes two rules: no transport to advance the journey, and no returning home until he could arrive on foot. It records his arrival on the English coast after swimming the Channel on 5 October 2026, with the journey towards Hull continuing beyond that landing.
That distinction matters: reaching England and finishing at home aren’t quite the same milestone.
The Week’s account describes dangerous crossings, threats, extreme conditions and long delays. It also includes the less cinematic business of waiting around for visas and eating whatever was available. I rather like that detail. An adventure can sound like one uninterrupted sequence of magnificent landscapes when it also involves months of administrative frustration.
There’s a temptation to turn a story like this into a motivational slogan. Set a goal! Never give up! Walk across a continent before breakfast!
TBH, I don’t think that’s particularly helpful. A commitment consuming decades involves costs and trade-offs most people wouldn’t want, and admiration doesn’t require pretending otherwise. You can respect the achievement without deciding that everyone else needs a more extreme hobby.
Ordinary kindness, repeated
What stayed with me was his positive view of humanity. In a Big Issue interview about what the journey taught him, Bushby describes the kindness he encountered and reflects on the approaching end of the purpose which has structured so much of his life.
That seems a more interesting lesson than a record distance.
We encounter so much of the wider world through accounts of conflict, fraud and cruelty. Those things are real, and his journey certainly wasn’t free of danger. But a person travelling through other people’s everyday lives also meets people willing to offer food, directions, shelter or company.
Those acts rarely qualify as news. They still matter enormously to the person receiving them.
There’s also something appealing about the time involved. Ordinary travel can become a checklist: arrive, photograph the recognisable thing, move on. Walking forces you to experience the unremarkable stretches between attractions. You see places which aren’t organised around being interesting to visitors.
I’m not claiming that makes every roadside mile profound. The clipping has Bushby admitting that walking can be extremely tedious, which makes him rather more believable than someone insisting every step was life-changing.
Final thoughts
I enjoy walking, but I don’t feel any pressing need to test my enthusiasm against the Bering Strait. A decent local route and getting home for dinner have quite a lot going for them.
Still, there’s something worth borrowing from Bushby’s story: curiosity about ordinary places, openness to strangers and a willingness to let experience complicate your assumptions.
The remarkable achievement is the journey. The encouraging part is that, after all its difficulties, he can still speak warmly about the people who helped him along it. That seems a reasonably good thing to bring home.
