By Basant El-Faramawy
British adventurer Karl Bushby is approaching the finish line of a 28-year journey on foot that began in 1998. Now 57, he is closing in on his mother’s home in Hull, England, after traversing four continents, 30 countries, and some of the planet’s most hostile terrain.
A trek by the numbers
Bushby has logged roughly 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers), the equivalent of 10,000 5K races, and taken an estimated 75 million steps since setting out at age 29.
The odyssey has spanned 10,226 days — far beyond his original five-year estimate. “We suspected it was 12 years plus,” Bushby said. “But never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined 28 years.”
When geopolitical barriers blocked passage through Russia and Iran, he spent 31 days crossing the Caspian Sea using a technique he calls “floatimming,” a hybrid of floating and swimming backward in a flotation vest and wetsuit.
Russia alone consumed a decade of the trek. Bushby was once detained for illegal entry after crossing the Bering Strait, and a 2012 visa denial prompted a 3,500-mile protest walk from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., which eventually secured his paperwork.
The route has covered South America, North America, Asia, and Europe — four of the seven continents. Along the way, Bushby fell in love twice, with women from Colombia and Japan, but both relationships succumbed to the demands of the road.
He estimates he wore out 10 pairs of shoes in the Americas before losing count. “After that we were just in and out of all kinds of different stuff,” he said. “The total? A lot.”
