LONDON: Karl Bushby is nearing the end of an epic walk around the world that he started half a lifetime ago in 1998.
He was a young man of 29 at the start and now he’s past middle age at 57 as he approaches his mother’s home in Hull, England.
He has navigated the shifting ice over the Bering Strait and swam across the Caspian Sea and English Channel, but most of the trip has been on land where he traversed dangerous jungle, rainforests, deserts, frozen tundra and battled almost every type of element imaginable.
Here’s a look at Bushby’s adventure, by the numbers:
If fitness trackers had been around when Bushby started his trip, it’s likely they couldn’t have kept up with his cumulative number of steps.
The total mileage Bushby put on his body is the equivalent of having run 10,000 5K road races (50,000 kilometres).
Bushby initially estimated the distance could be traversed in five years. “Then you just dump a whole bucket full of reality on that,” he said. “We suspected that it was 12 years plus. And the plus was a big plus. But never in our wildest dreams would we ever have imagined 28 years.” That adds up to more than 10,220 days.
When geopolitical conflicts closed off passage through Russia and Iran, Bushby decided he would swim across the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water. His 31-day crossing relied on a technique he calls “floatimming,” a hybrid of floating and swimming. He wore a flotation vest and wetsuit and plodded backward by flapping his arms in the water.
Starting in Chile and ending in the U.K., he has entered or passed through 30 foreign countries before returning home.
No country took longer to get through than Russia, where Bushby spent 10 years, was once detained and faced deportation for entering illegally after crossing the Bering Strait. Harsh weather only permitted a few months of travel each year and there were many bureaucratic delays. Russia denied him a visa in 2012, so Bushby spent a year walking 3,500 miles (5,600 kilometres) in protest from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., which eventually led to him getting the proper paperwork. Still, it ended up taking about a decade to be done with the country.
The trek has taken Bushby through South America, North America, Asia and Europe – all but three of the world’s seven continents.
Bushby fell in love twice and had his heart broken each time. He carried on long-term romances with a woman from Colombia and another from Japan. But the relationships couldn’t weather the toll of the road.
Bushby estimates he went through 10 pairs of shoes traveling through the Americas but then lost track. That was 20 years ago, though, so who can blame him? “After that we were just in and out of all kinds of different stuff,” he said. The total? “A lot.”
