The man who has been walking home since 1998

{"text":[[{"start":6.16,"text":"As an energetic young paratrooper in the mid-1990s, Karl Bushby yearned for adventure in a period of relative peace. Growing listless, and wounded by the end of an early marriage, he came up with an outlandish idea: to walk around the world, following a 50,000km route from the southern tip of Chile back to his mother’s house in Hull, northern England."}],[{"start":28.02,"text":"As the soldier planned his journey and served out his notice, he remembers standing on the chalk cliffs of Kent, yards from his barracks behind Dover Castle, and picturing his triumphant homecoming."}],[{"start":38.84,"text":"“If I squinted, I could almost see this dishevelled character arriving on the other side,” he says. “I would just try to imagine what he must have experienced and seen to get there. That image has always been the fire under this thing.”"}],[{"start":52.2,"text":"Bushby, who was 29 when he flew to Punta Arenas in November 1998 and started walking, can soon dispense with imagination. At some point next week, the now 57-year-old wanderer will stand on the French coast just as he dreamt, before — all being well — swimming to England for the final walk home."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":72.26,"text":"Yet the English Channel has proved to be one of the toughest hurdles for the veteran, who has survived the guerrillas, drug runners and venomous snakes of the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, and swam 300km across the Caspian Sea. In 2006, he made it over the shifting ice of the Bering Strait from Alaska only to be thrown into a Russian jail for not arriving at an official port of entry. He owes his freedom to John Prescott, then his MP and the deputy prime minister, who had a word with the regional governor (one Roman Abramovich)."}],[{"start":105.56,"text":"Bushby has always stuck to two rules: to never use any kind of transport to advance along his route, and not to return to the UK until he arrived on foot. After being refused entry to the Channel Tunnel, which he hoped to walk along via a service tunnel, he was then denied permission to swim to England (Channel swimmers always start from England as France has a blanket ban). He thought he had persuaded the authorities earlier this month, but things are up in the air again."}],[{"start":131.8,"text":"“It’s still doable, but it’s just going to depend whether it’s the nice plan or a really crappy plan,” he tells me from his tent one evening last week. He’s camping in woods near the Belgian city of Mons, about 10 days’ walk from the coast. The cart he uses to push along his belongings sits next to him. He declines to reveal what the “crappy” plan might involve."}],[{"start":156.64,"text":"Either way, he’s determined to reach Hull by early November, after almost three decades spent either on the road or in Mexico, an affordable base to return to when visa problems and the pandemic interrupted progress. Delays (including a year-long detour from Los Angeles to the Russian embassy in Washington to successfully protest against the country’s decision not to grant him a visa) have more than doubled his original 12-year target. “At some point you put so much into the mission that you just know there’s no quitting,” he says. “You’re going all the way, however long it takes.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":193.92,"text":"While he has been too immersed in his own adventure to notice, Bushby’s exploits have coincided with growing demand for a particular kind of extreme travel. A burgeoning corps of obsessive globetrotters are redefining long-distance adventure in an age of digital visas, remote work and social media."}],[{"start":212.36,"text":"“The numbers have gone up massively,” says Harry Mitsidis, a British traveller who in 2012 founded NomadMania, a site that ranks travellers according to how much of the world they have seen. Mitsidis, who is 54 and grew up in Greece, says that when he ticked off the last of the 193 UN-recognised countries in 2008, about half a dozen people achieved the feat each year. “Last year we had 85 people,” he tells me from a sun lounger in Montenegro during a rare off-mission holiday. He now knows of more than 500 “UN masters”, as country completists like to be called."}],[{"start":248.4,"text":"Torbjørn “Thor” Pedersen remembers being awestruck by stories of early explorers as he grew up in Denmark. After developing itchy feet while working in shipping logistics, he set out in 2013 to become the first person to visit every country in one unbroken journey, spending at least 24 hours in each nation and taking no flights. (The rules of competitive travel are as arbitrary as they are complex; NomadMania rejects airport layovers or train passages — you have to touch ground to say you’ve been somewhere. Most Travelled People, a rival community founded in 2005, likes to see passport stamps and selfies, but neither site sets a minimum for time spent in a country.)"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":291.4,"text":"“It was my chance to do something that I truly believed was historic,” says Pedersen, 47. He thought the mission would take about four years, but after he had hitched rides on 37 container ships, survived cerebral malaria in Ghana and ridden out the pandemic in Hong Kong, a decade had passed when he finally returned to Denmark. He recalls initially rattling through European countries with a conqueror’s mindset but soon slowed down, valuing meaningful encounters more than his list. “When I left home, it was a country project but then I realised it was a people project,” he says."}],[{"start":327.8,"text":"The warmth and beauty he encountered helped him through the low moments, not least the brush with malaria. “The more I think about it, the more certain I am that I wouldn’t be able to do it again,” he says."}],[{"start":338.88,"text":"Mitsidis says the rise of e-visas has made it easier to access many countries that used to require embassy visits. The pandemic, meanwhile, fuelled a surge in country collecting once the world reopened, while also normalising remote working."}],[{"start":353.92,"text":"Extreme travel also doesn’t come cheap. Bushby and Pedersen have been swept along by individual and corporate donors as well as gear sponsors and book and film deals. Pedersen is promoting The Impossible Journey, a documentary about him by Canadian film-maker Mike Douglas. The Dane is due to present it at the Kendal Mountain Festival in Cumbria in November, before it’s released on streaming services next year."}],[{"start":377.04,"text":"Bushby has had unlikely patrons in Hollywood: Jordan Tappis and Beau Willimon, whose screenwriting and production credits include House of Cards and Severance, first approached him in 2013 and provided financial and logistical support, as well as cameras. Last week the adventurer announced to his half a million TikTok followers that Tappis and Willimon are using hundreds of hours of footage to make a film about his journey, to be directed by the Oscar-winning German film-maker Werner Herzog."}],[{"start":407.12,"text":"Yet Mitsidis, a former business studies lecturer, says that big walks and visits to every country are no longer enough to satisfy modern Marco Polos. NomadMania further divides the world into 1,381 regions. The UK, for example, has 21 regions. Africa has 54 countries — and 252 regions. Nobody has yet visited all of these world regions, although Mitsidis is up to 1,354, second only to Michael Runkel, a German travel photographer."}],[{"start":438.44,"text":"Competitive travellers tend not to start out that way, says Mitsidis, who was born in London to a Greek father and a South African mother. Travel became an outlet for a restless curiosity about his place in the world. “If you can’t belong in any country, you might as well belong in every country,” he says. Lists and leagues “became a structure for me to travel rationally rather than just randomly going around”."}],[{"start":461.84,"text":"The need for structured escape seems to unite many of the new nomads. Bushby has talked about his miserable school years, when he was bullied for undiagnosed dyslexia. His mother Angela recently sent him a letter, in which she expressed her worries about his Channel swim. She also wrote: “You used to think you were useless. Well, you have proven you’re not.” But Bushby resists the suggestion that he has been running away from anything except perhaps his own mortality. “There is an experience, a life out there,” he says. “We’re also all dying, so what are you going to do with yourself?”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":493.64,"text":"Charles Veley, a former software tycoon, founded Most Travelled People (MTP) after Guinness World Records gave up listing its “most travelled person” accolade, which he had been about to claim. The 61-year-old now tops MTP’s own league, which lists 1,500 regions (he’s on 1,428). To tick off Rockall, an uninhabited fist of granite 430km north-west of Ireland, he once jumped off a boat rising on surging waves and, for a moment, clung to its walls."}],[{"start":527,"text":"“You get so addicted to the thrill of arriving in a new place,” Veley tells me from Myanmar, where he’s visiting Naypyidaw as part of a mission to bag his final four cities on MTP’s list of national capitals (only Belmopan in Belize, Tegucigalpa in Honduras and Ngerulmud in Palau now remain). “No matter how small it may be, it’s just a feeling of conquering and having set a plan and then achieving it.”"}],[{"start":551.92,"text":"Like Mitsidis at NomadMania, Veley has noticed similar growth at MTP, and says increasing awareness and publicity is inspiring a new generation to take up a pursuit that had largely been dominated by men of a certain age. Sophia Lee, a 21-year-old Alaska-born German-American traveller, epitomises this new cohort, which embraces social media to document and fund journeys via sponsorship deals."}],[{"start":576.04,"text":"“Instagram has also really helped me to connect with more local people and learn about the places I’m travelling through,” Lee tells me from Dubai, where she’s preparing to return to Africa to tick off the last three countries on the UN list: Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Sudan. She’s hoping to become the youngest UN master, but will have to wait to get inside North Korea, which has remained closed to tourists since the pandemic."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":599.64,"text":"Finishing these journeys can be the toughest challenge. Pedersen has been stuck in a whirlwind of film and book promotion alongside speaking engagements since he returned to Denmark three years ago. “On paper my life looks very successful but I need another job now,” he says, laughing."}],[{"start":614.72,"text":"For the most addicted itinerants, there is always the temptation to set new targets, to take on new lists. Last year, Jaime Alemán, 72, a wealthy Panamanian lawyer and former diplomat, hitched a ride into orbit with Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space tourism company. By adding space to his list of destinations, which also includes the UN nations and both poles, he became the first person to complete the “Grand Slam of Travel” — a record that hadn’t existed but which is now the title of a memoir due out next March. I put it to Lee that she’s young enough perhaps to one day add Mars to her own list. “I’ll have to think about it,” she says."}],[{"start":654.24,"text":"A large part of Bushby dreads his return to England, where he hasn’t set foot for 28 years. “That’s going to be a hard stop right there,” he says. “That’s me sitting in my mother’s house in Hull at 57 with nothing, it’s going to really suck.”"}],[{"start":669.84,"text":"Walking may not feature in his plans for some time; he now has a slight limp and has lost count of the number of boots he’s burned through. “My body’s telling me it’s time to get this done,” he says before bedding down for another night under canvas. The English Channel looms large to the west."}],[{"start":686.5,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":696.6,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1790314735_5022.mp3"}