In 28 years of walking, Karl Bushby has overcome jungle, desert and red tape. Now he's nearly home

MARKET RASEN, England — Karl Bushby has spent 28 years walking home, but as he approaches the finish Monday, it’s not clear he's ready for the audacious journey to end.

Pushing a cart loaded with camping gear up a busy country road in northern England about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the finish line, Bushby was uncertain of the future, anxious about the prospect of living in his mom’s basement and facing an identity crisis.

“My purpose and reason for living is about to end,” he said. “It’s going to be difficult … trying to blend back into a society that you just don’t know anymore.”

Bushby, 57, was just shy of 30 when he entered the unknown at the tip of South America on Nov. 1, 1998. Since then, he has walked 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) across four continents, navigated shifting ice over the Bering Strait and swam — a generous description of his technique — across the Caspian Sea and English Channel. He has battled almost every type of element and terrain imaginable through 30 foreign countries to get back to where he started half a lifetime ago.

Swampy jungle, scorching desert and frozen tundra slowed him down, but mountains of red tape helped turn what was supposed to be a 12-year trek into the epic he has dubbed the “Goliath Expedition.”

Journey worthy of Greek warrior

It’s taken nearly three times as long for Bushby to return to his mother, Angela, in Hull, as it took the hero in “ The Odyssey ” to make it back to his wife, Penelope, in Ithaca.

“Odysseus was a bit of an amateur,” Bushby quipped. “But, you know, I’ll cut him some slack — I haven’t met any giant Cyclops.”

The real world provided plenty of menaces of its own: there was a standoff with a polar bear; he floated through crocodile-infested waters to avoid a guerrilla war in Colombia; a mob attacked him in Peru; and he was rescued by helicopter from an ice floe drifting out to sea.

The former British paratrooper's mission was sparked by a birthday card from his father, Keith, in the mid-90s. Keith, an Army veteran himself, mentioned an argument special forces troops once had about the possibility of walking from London to New York over the Bering land bridge believed by some scientists to have been used by early humans to migrate from Asia to the Americas at a time of lower sea levels.

Bushby drew a continuous line on a map across Europe and Asia to North America and — instead of going to New York — carried on straight down to the tip of Chile.

“And that was it,” he said. “With that under my skin, there was no going back.”

Quest had 2 grounding rules

Explorers have long circled the planet by boat, plane, balloon, bicycle and even on foot. But most walkers have relied on transport to cross oceans.

Bushby imposed two strict rules for his journey: transportation could not be used to move forward and he had to return home on foot.

He set out with $500 and soon found himself fighting hurricane-force winds on the Patagonian Steppe. He dodged war in the dangerous Darién Gap, the roadless and rugged jungle, rainforest and mountains between South and Central America, in 2001 and was then jailed for 18 days after crossing a restricted border zone in Panama.

After being airlifted to safety during the 56-mile Bering Strait crossing in 2006 with American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer, he had a near-death plunge into freezing waters and they nearly lost all their supplies. After managing the rare crossing, they were jailed and faced deportation for entering Russia illegally.

2 steps forward, one step back

It took almost 10 years to get through Russia because of visa issues and weather that only allowed travel a few months a year. When Russia denied him a visa in 2012, Bushby walked in protest from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., which eventually led to him getting the proper paperwork.

With each setback, he would retreat to the U.S. or Mexico, where living was much cheaper, and wait for his next chance to return to the point where he left off.

He was trailed by police through China, had a lengthy setback from the pandemic and was forced to swim 31 days across the Caspian Sea because geopolitical problems had closed off Russia and Iran. He is not a good swimmer and relied on a flotation vest and wetsuit as he plodded backward by flapping his arms in a technique he calls “floatimming,” a hybrid of floating and swimming.

Europe presented its own challenges, with 90-day limits on visits that forced him to travel in three-month chunks.

Romance has also intervened. He spent seven years with a Colombian woman, and three with a woman from Japan. Each relationship ended in heartbreak that seemed fated by such an itinerant lifestyle.

Carried forward by kindness of strangers, sponsors

It's been tough on his family. Bushby has a son from an early marriage to a Belfast woman that ended in divorce. His son mostly grew up without him and is now in his mid-30s. His father met him on the beach in Dover when he crossed the channel, but Bushby hasn't seen his mother in a decade, which adds to the trepidation about his return.

He has been helped by a shifting group of sponsors that have come and gone as the trip dragged on and fortunes tumbled in the 2008 financial crisis. For the past 16 years, he has relied mainly on a production company founded by “House of Cards” creator Beau Willimon and music producer Jordan Tappis, who are backing a documentary in the works by filmmaker Werner Herzog.

It has been the kindness of countless strangers, though, that has buoyed and propelled him throughout, particularly from those who have the least to offer.

He's been welcomed into shacks assembled from car parts, nursed back to health from a bad stomach infection by a Peruvian doctor's family, and fed countless meals of just rice and water by people seeking nothing in return.

“I’ve been welcomed in by the poorest of the poor,” he said. “I’ve met 99.9999 percent of the very best of humanity. Every culture, every country has been the same response.”

Local boy returns to celebrity welcome

There have been endless stretches of loneliness that have made his final push almost surreal as word spreads of his passage through the rolling green fields that lead to his native Yorkshire. Big rigs literally blowing past him on the road near the town of Market Rasen on Wednesday tooted their horns, drivers waved and a group of motorcyclists stopped to take selfies.

Howard Denton pulled his car over and couldn't understand how a couple of cyclists he had spoken with briefly hadn't taken note of their fellow traveler.

“I said to them, ’Did you see that bloke who’s walked around the world?'” Denton said. “They said, ‘No.’ They didn’t think of asking him where he was going. I just couldn’t believe how stupid they were. I think he’s incredible. I think he’s amazing.”

With each mile, the end draws closer.

When Bushby started out, he looked like Kurt Cobain and even inspired an internet mock conspiracy that the late Nirvana leader was still alive, and walking around the world under a pseudonym.

He's more weathered today, softer in the midsection and has a salty beard. But his bright blue eyes, blond hair and tan belie his age.

He may not know what lies ahead but one thing is certain: he won't miss the thousands of steps he takes each day.

“I’m not doing it because I like walking,” he said. “It’s a means of getting somewhere.”