In scenes of pure emotion that brought tears to the eyes of hundreds gathered in Hull city center today, former British paratrooper Karl Bushby finally walked the last few steps of an almost unbelievable 28-year odyssey that began at the bottom of South America.
Pushing the battered, heavily loaded two-wheeled cart he has dubbed "The Beast," the now 57-year-old adventurer was mobbed by cheering well-wishers, soldiers in berets, and a throng of media as he arrived outside Hull City Hall on Monday morning. Fighting back emotion, he told the crowd: “There has never been a welcome home quite like this, I’m sure. This is absolute madness. After 28 years, you couldn’t ask for more than this.”
It is the end of the Goliath Expedition – a self-imposed mission to walk the longest unbroken path on Earth from Chile back to his mother’s door in Hull without ever using motorised transport to advance, or setting foot back in Britain until the very end. What he originally thought would take around 12 years ballooned into nearly three decades of jungles, frozen seas, deserts, visa nightmares, gunpoint encounters, and sheer stubborn endurance.
Bushby, who served 11 years with the Parachute Regiment, including tours in Northern Ireland, left Hull in October 1998 and flew to Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile. On 1 November 1998 – with just a few hundred dollars in his pocket and no major sponsors – he began walking north. The two strict rules he set himself: no transport to move forward, and no going home until he arrived on foot.
His path took him the length of South America through Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Two years in, he faced one of the journey’s most terrifying stretches: the Darién Gap, a lawless, roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama notorious for guerrillas, paramilitaries, snakes and swamps. Disguising himself as a vagrant, he evaded FARC fighters who locals warned would likely kill or kidnap him. He made it into Panama in early 2001 only to spend 18 days in jail for entering without a visa.
Continuing north through Central America, where he welded a new version of his cart in Nicaragua, and Mexico (where he was again held at gunpoint), he entered the United States in 2002. Years of asphalt walking followed through the US and into Alaska.
The most legendary crossing came in March 2006. Partnered with French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer, Bushby stepped onto the shifting ice of the Bering Strait. Over 14 brutal days they navigated a zigzagging 150-mile route across broken ice floes, open water and temperatures plunging to around -35°C (with windchills far lower) to cover the 58-mile strait from Alaska into Siberia. Currents dragged them off course; ice cracked beneath their tent. “It was like being Moses watching the Red Sea part,” he later recalled. On the Russian side, they were immediately detained for illegal entry. The expedition nearly died there, but high-level intervention, including from then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, whose constituency was Hull, eventually allowed him to continue.
Russia proved a years-long bureaucratic and climatic ordeal. Visa limits, winter-only travel across frozen tundra and rivers, a five-year ban, and financial crises forced long delays. At one point, he walked thousands of miles across the US to the Russian Embassy in Washington as a protest. He faced a polar bear in the far northeast and spent a decade intermittently progressing through Siberia.
From there, the route continued into Mongolia and China (where he was escorted under surveillance), then Kazakhstan. Geopolitics and closed borders forced another extraordinary water crossing: in August 2024 he swam roughly 288 kilometers (179 miles) across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan over 31 days using a “floatimming” technique in a wetsuit and flotation vest, supported by a small team.
He then walked through Georgia and Turkey (crossing the Bosphorus on foot), into Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and onward through Western Europe. After reaching France, he was denied permission to walk the Channel Tunnel. Instead, in early October 2026 – almost exactly 28 years after leaving Hull – he swam the English Channel, landing near Dover after days in the water.
Today’s arrival in Hull crowns the final miles. He will complete the official journey with the short walk to his mother’s house in the Sutton Park area of the city – the home he last visited in 1998. Waiting for him are his mother Angela (who has kept scrapbooks of the entire adventure), his 36-year-old son Adam (who was just eight when his father left and has said the return “doesn’t seem real”), and a 12-year-old granddaughter he has never met in person. Bushby has previously described leaving his young son as “purely selfish” while acknowledging the emotional cost and distance it created, even as the pair maintained contact and met on a few occasions over the years.
Through it all he has credited the kindness of strangers across continents. “It took a world to get me here,” he told supporters. After more than 31,000 miles (around 50,000 km), roughly 30 countries, 10,000-plus days, and an estimated 75 million steps, the longest walk home in modern history is finally complete.
As the crowds cheered and “The Beast” rolled through the streets of Hull, one thing was clear: for Karl Bushby, the impossible had become reality.
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