Karl Bushby reached his mother’s home in Hull on Monday, 28 years and one day after he set out from Punta Arenas, Chile, pushing a cart.
The claim: 28 years, 31,000 miles, one man and a cart.
The arithmetic: at 20 miles a day, 31,000 miles is about four years of walking. The other 24 went elsewhere.
NBC News headlined it a “28-year, 31,000-mile walk around world.” Do the division. Between the two dates sit 10,228 days, so he averaged 3.03 miles a day.
The 20-miles-a-day pace is our assumption, a hard but ordinary expedition day. It is what the distance requires, not a log of what he walked, and Bushby’s own log is in none of the reports we read.
Where the Other 24 Years Went
His first estimate was about five years. His team expected 12 or more. What happened instead, from AP and NPR:
- 2001: Panama jailed him for 18 days after he crossed a restricted border zone.
- 2006: After the Bering Strait crossing, Russia jailed him and threatened deportation for entering illegally.
- 2008: The financial crash dried up his sponsors.
- 2012: Russia refused him a visa, and he walked from Los Angeles to the Russian embassy in Washington to protest. Crossing Russia took nearly 10 years.
- 2020: The pandemic stalled the trip.
- 2024: With the land routes into Europe shut, he swam the Caspian Sea.
- 2026: Denied access to the Channel Tunnel, he swam the English Channel in October.
We think the mileage is the least interesting number here. What set the pace was permission: sponsors, visas, a tunnel operator, a Russian border post. The cost fell on other people, and Bushby told NPR that those closest to him “pay a price for your antics and for your ambitions.”
Call it a walk around the world if you like. It was a 28-year negotiation with borders, and he won it on points.
On the last day he pushed the cart to a welcome at Hull City Hall, pictured above, before the final stretch to his mother’s street. Six speaking dates are booked for the next two months, a sequel to his memoir is due, and Werner Herzog is making a film about the trek. Bushby expects the post-expedition letdown to be hard and plans another mission.
Photo: Ian S, via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.