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

MARKET RASEN, England (AP) — 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 50 kilometers (30 miles) 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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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% of the very best of humanity. Every culture, every country has been the same response.”

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.”

British adventurer Karl Bushby walks near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, England, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, on the final stretch of his 28-year walk around the world to get back to his mother's home in Hull. (AP Photo/Brian Melley)

British adventurer Karl Bushby pauses near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, England, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, on the final stretch of his 28-year walk around the world to get back to his mother's home in Hull. (AP Photo/Brian Melley)

British adventurer Karl Bushby walks near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, England, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, on the final stretch of his 28-year walk around the world to get back to his mother's home in Hull. (AP Photo/Brian Melley)

British adventurer Karl Bushby pauses during his walk near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, England, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, on the final stretch of his 28-year walk around the world to get back to his mother's home in Hull. (AP Photo/Brian Melley)

British adventurer Karl Bushby walks near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, England, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, on the final stretch of his 28-year walk around the world to get back to his mother's home in Hull. (AP Photo/Brian Melley)

LONDON (AP) — U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham says his government will consider apologizing for the first time for its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade as it seeks to strengthen relations with nations in Africa and the Caribbean.

Writing in the Guardian on Saturday, Burnham said Britain needed to acknowledge its “complicated history” in order to protect the Commonwealth, an association of 56 independent nations that grew out of the British Empire. Burnham travels to Antigua and Barbuda next week for a meeting of Commonwealth leaders.

“For years, those members of the Commonwealth affected by the slave trade have asked for an honest conversation about the legacies of slavery,” Burnham said. “By sticking our heads in the sand, we have damaged the ability of the Commonwealth to function.”

Burnham said his government is offering to begin a “structured dialogue” with those affected by slavery and will listen to calls for a formal apology by the British state. But he said Britain would continue to resist calls for it to pay reparations for the slave trade.

“I do not think that British people today can be held liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part,” Burnham said.

Instead, the prime minister said he wanted to address the issues that face the Commonwealth and other nations today, including high levels of debt faced by many developing countries.

Burnham said he would work with other wealthy nations and investors to help vulnerable countries pay off their debts over a longer period and at lower interest rates. To help move this initiative forward, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a champion of debt relief for developing nations, will attend the Commonwealth meeting, he said.

King Charles III faced calls for Britain to apologize and pay reparations during the first phase of a nine-day trip to the Caribbean that will end with the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting Sunday through Wednesday in St. John’s, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda.

Speaking in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, on Tuesday, Charles acknowledged “the great suffering and injustices of the past” but stopped short of an apology.

The king until now has been prevented from going further because it was government policy not to apologize for the country’s role in the slave trade and Britain’s constitutional monarch speaks on behalf of the elected government.

Burnham’s comments come as Britain seeks to shore up relations with its traditional allies in the Commonwealth in the face of economic, environmental and military challenges around the world.

A change in the government’s position could also respond to younger, more liberal voters at home, where activists have called for Britain to re-examine the legacy of its colonial history.

In 2020, anti-racism protesters in Bristol tore down the statue of Edward Colston, an English merchant and politician, saying the city should no longer glorify the life of a slave trader. Colston was a deputy governor of the Royal African Company, which shipped thousands of enslaved people to English colonies in the Americas.

The descendants of some British people who profited from the slave trade have already apologized and offered compensation. Those include the owner of the Guardian, a liberal newspaper where leaders of Burnham’s Labour Party often lay out policy initiatives.

U.K. politicians have traditionally focused on the country’s role in banning the slave trade in 1807 and outlawing slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.

But Burnham said it is now time for the country to acknowledge the other side of the story as well.

“We are a country where brave people led the way in abolishing slavery, but we are also a country that participated in the trade in human lives,” he said.

“The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a brutal and barbaric violation of those people. … I want to express my sorrow and regret for the pain and suffering of so many millions of people, and to recognize the way it still shapes our world today.”

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham leaves 10 Downing Street to attend the weekly Prime Ministers' Questions session in parliament in London, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026.(AP Photo/Thomas Krych)