The Guy Who Is Literally Walking Around the Entire World Is Almost Home
Some stories are too big for one lifetime, like that of this British man who set out with a backpack, a cart, and a belief that he could circle the planet on his own two feet. Now, more than 25 years after the first step, he’s closing in on the final stretch toward home.
The biggest obstacles he faced didn’t always involve weather, animals, or deserts that swallow you whole. Years of red tape, border issues, bans, and unexpected detours stretched his 12-year plan into almost three decades. And now he’s nearly back in the country he left in the late 1990s.
The final countdown has begun, and the walk is about to come full circle.
Beginning Of A Wild Idea
In 1998, Karl Bushby, a former paratrooper in his 20s, had a seemingly impossible plan. He wanted to leave Punta Arenas in southern Chile and reach his hometown of Hull, England, strictly on foot. His rule was to follow one continuous line of footsteps around the Earth.
He had no major sponsors, very little money, and a path that stretched over 36,000 miles. This should have been intimidating enough, but the route also included jungles, deserts, and a frozen ocean.
Still, he stepped outside on November 1 that year, pulling a cart he named the Beast, and walked north. He thought the whole thing would take about twelve years at most. He wasn’t even close.
Journey Through The Americas
South America came first. Bushby crossed Chile and Argentina, then followed roads and rough tracks north toward Colombia. One of the earliest major obstacles sat between him and Panama—the Darien Gap. The patch of wilderness swallowed two months of his life.
It also included a long detention by authorities in Panama before he could continue. Once he made it through, he pushed on through Central America, stepped into Mexico, and reached the United States in 2002.
Across the US, he walked north to Alaska. There, the next hurdle waited.
The Bering Strait
Image via Wikimedia Commons/Crissi
The Bering Strait looks manageable on a map, but it’s 57 miles of shifting ice and freezing water between Alaska and Siberia. Crossing it isn’t something most people list as part of “realistic travel plans.”
In March 2006, Bushby teamed up with French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer to attempt the crossing. It took fourteen days to fight through unstable ice and dangerous currents.
They reached Russia, exhausted and battered, only to be detained for entering without using an official port. This marked the start of Karl’s long, complicated relationship with Russian bureaucracy.
Long Delays And Endless Paperwork
Russia slowed him down more than any mountain range. The country only allowed him to stay 90 days out of every 180, so progress crept forward in short windows over many years. He lost sponsors, ran out of money, and spent long stretches in Mexico waiting for visas.
In 2013, Russia issued a five-year entry ban. Instead of giving up, Bushby walked nearly three thousand miles across the United States to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest the decision. A year later, the ban was lifted.
He returned to Russia, walked across Siberia, crossed Mongolia, traversed a long stretch of the Gobi Desert with a group that later split apart, and continued alone into China.
By 2018, he had made it through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Then the next major wall appeared. He couldn’t get a visa for Iran, which he needed to follow his original overland line. The pandemic hit soon after and stranded him again.
A Backup Plan That Required Swimming Across A Sea
Image via Getty Images/Rafael_Wiedenmeier
When the land route was blocked, Bushby and fellow long-distance walker Angela Maxwell came up with a new option: swimming the Caspian Sea. Bushby didn’t even like swimming, but he agreed.
After walking across the Kyzylkum Desert to the Kazakh shoreline, the pair began their attempt in October 2024. The crossing was 288 kilometers (179 miles), broken into daily sessions of three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. It took just over a month.
Safety boats followed, and the conditions were rough enough that Bushby later admitted he had no natural skill for that type of challenge. Still, it worked. They reached Azerbaijan and stepped back onto land.
Turkey And The Route Toward Europe
After completing his long push across Azerbaijan in late 2024, Bushby continued west until he reached Turkey. Months of steady walking brought him to Istanbul, where he approached one of the most anticipated crossings of his entire route.
On May 2, 2025, he crossed the Bosphorus and stepped into Europe. That 1.5-kilometer stretch of water marked the moment he left Asia behind and entered the final continent of his global loop.
Since then, he has continued to move, country by country, across Europe. By late 2025, he had reached Hungary, roughly 75 miles south of Budapest, with the route toward Central and Western Europe ahead of him. The timeline points toward a homecoming in September 2026, nearly 28 years after he left Chile.
He often comments on how different the United Kingdom will feel when he gets there. He left during the Tony Blair era, but the country has shifted through several governments, political storms, and major events while he remained on foot, thousands of miles away.
The Last Miles Ahead
As of late 2025, Bushby has covered more than 47,000 kilometers (29,000 miles) across four continents and 25 countries. He has pushed through deserts, jungles, mountain chains, and even the frozen Bering Strait. He has spent years caught in visa battles, stranded between borders, or stuck waiting for countries to reopen after global shutdowns. Despite all of it, he is closing in on the final stretch.
He has somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 miles left before reaching his hometown of Hull. The last major logistical obstacle is how to cross the English Channel without breaking his own rule against using transport. He hopes to secure special permission to walk through the maintenance tunnel inside the Channel Tunnel, but nothing has been confirmed yet.
The rest of the journey will unfold in the same way the previous 27 years have: step by step, pointed toward home.