A 28-Year Walk

Karl Bushby decided to walk from Chile to the United Kingdom. Twenty-eight years later, he finished the journey.

In this 2025 photo, British adventurer Karl Bushby poses on the Bosphorus Bridge, which connects Asia and Europe.

Is it possible to walk from Chile to the United Kingdom (UK)? In 1998, Karl Bushby decided to find out. He set off from Chile with the goal of walking back to his hometown in the UK. Twenty-eight years later, he set foot on UK soil.

Bushby set out on his journey from the southern tip of Chile on November 1, 1998. He planned to walk as much of the trip as possible, not allowing himself to swim unless there was no other way to move forward. He mapped a route that would require him to trek north from South America to North America and then west to Asia and Europe.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

This map shows the route Karl Bushby took when he walked from Chile to the United Kingdom.

On October 5, 2026, Bushby arrived in the UK after swimming across the English Channel from France. He made it back to Hull, his hometown, on November 2. On his route from Chile, Bushby had walked through 29 countries. His total walking distance was about 31,000 miles (58,000 kilometers).

During his journey, Bushby walked through all kinds of environments, including humid jungles and hot, dry deserts. Reaching Alaska, he experienced some of the coldest temperatures on the planet. At one point, he encountered a polar bear. Luckily, the bear just stared at him for a few moments and then kept moving.

But that wasn’t the biggest challenge Bushby faced. To reach Russia from the United States, he had to cross a narrow body of water called the Bering Strait. During the winter, the strait is icy but not completely frozen, and no one had ever been able to walk across it before. Bushby and adventurer Dimitri Kieffer tried it together and nearly lost their footing on the thin, shifting ice before finally making it to the other side.

Sometimes laws and policies made traveling difficult. Officials stopped Bushby and Kieffer in Russia, saying they did not have the right to enter the country. After almost two months, they were allowed to continue the journey. Bushby ran into more problems in western Asia, where government authorities would not allow him to travel through their countries on foot. To keep things going, Bushby decided to swim across the Caspian Sea with adventurer Angela Maxwell, another friend of his.

Now back in the UK, Bushby is enjoying what his country has to offer, including fish and chips with mushy peas—a dish Bushby says is just not the same anywhere else. But something that is the same everywhere, Bushby says, is human kindness. Many times, when he needed help along the journey, someone was there.

“I always say 99.999% of the people I met represented the very best of humanity,” Bushby told the Guardian. “Every country has been the same.”

Click through the slideshow for some photos of the adventure!