On the afternoon of Monday, October 5, a 57-year-old former British paratrooper in a wetsuit waded out of the English Channel onto Shakespeare Beach, just south of Dover, where his father, brothers, and filmmaker Werner Herzog stood waiting with a camera crew. Karl Bushby, who told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in a September interview published by Malay Mail that he swims “like a cat dropped in a bathtub,” had spent most of the summer trying to avoid that crossing.
His first plan was to walk the service tunnel between the two rail tunnels under the Channel, a request the operator, Getlink, formally rejected, according to Euro Weekly News. The French coast presented its own problem, since a rule in place since 1993 bars swimmers from setting off from France toward England, and his team spent weeks in talks with French maritime authorities before the swim was approved. Bushby completed the crossing in about 20 hours of swimming over three days, and his team kept the attempt quiet for safety and security reasons until he reached shore.
How Karl Bushby’s Goliath Expedition Began In Chile In 1998
Bushby set out from Punta Arenas, near Chile’s southern tip, on November 1, 1998, with about $500 in his pocket and a plan he came to call the Goliath Expedition. He set two rules for himself: never use transportation to move the journey forward, and to return to his mother’s home near Hull, in northern England, only on foot. ITV News reported that he expected the walk to take about 12 years, and the route has since covered roughly 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) across 29 countries.
In the early years, he headed north through the Andes and Central America, including a dangerous crossing of the Darién Gap, the roadless stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama known for its terrain and drug cartels. At the top of the Americas, Bushby and fellow adventurer Dimitri Kieffer spent two weeks crossing the shifting sea ice of the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia, with Bushby carrying a rifle in case they met polar bears.
Visa Bans And A Month-Long Caspian Sea Swim Slowed The Walk Home
A three-month Russian tourist visa covered only a fraction of the time Bushby needed to cross the country on foot, and years of diplomatic negotiation followed before he could continue. At one point, he walked more than 3,000 miles from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest, per BusinessDay. Visa limits in other countries regularly forced him to leave before his permitted time ran out, so he waited in Mexico or the United States, then returned to the exact spot where he had stopped walking, ITV News reported.
With Russia and Iran both closed to him in Central Asia, Bushby backtracked to Uzbekistan, crossed the Kyzylkum Desert, and swam about 179 miles (288 kilometers) across the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan, spending 31 days at sea, according to his official Goliath Expedition website. American long-distance walker Angela Maxwell swam with him, along with two teenage Azerbaijani national swimming champions and a maritime support team. From Azerbaijan, his route took him through Georgia, Turkey, and several European countries, before he reached Belgium in early June, roughly 600 miles from Hull.
What’s Left Before Karl Bushby Reaches Hull
In a statement released the day after he landed, Bushby said it “feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years,” AFP reported. “It hasn’t been easy, and that’s part of the point,” he added in comments published by ITV News, saying the journey proved he was more capable than he gave himself credit for.
The expedition officially ends at his mother’s house in Sutton Park, Hull, about 250 miles north of the Kent coast. ITV News reported that he expects to arrive within the next month. Herzog’s crew is filming the final stretch for a feature-length documentary titled Walk of Life, and the production company behind it has supported Bushby financially and logistically for the past 16 years. Bushby told AFP that once he finishes, he plans to devote his time to the film and to public speaking.
He has also spoken openly about the strangeness of arriving. Speaking to BBC Radio in 2025, he described the end of the walk as a point where his purpose for living would come to “a hard stop.” His mother, Angela, said she will be waiting at the family home in Hull, the same house he left in 1998 and hasn’t entered since.
