For the past 25 years, Karl Bushby has been walking across the world. He's done so without transportation, choosing to travel the globe in unbroken steps. Bushby has been traveling the world for an astonishing but exhausting two decades. He started in November 1998 and hasn't looked back since.
Still, the adventurer may face his biggest challenge yet in his journey across the world. Bushby originally began his journey in Chile. The Goliath Expedition was supposed to finish in 12 years, but the adventure took twice as long. He's traveled some 36,000 miles.
Speaking with The Armchair Adventurer, he said, "Well, not technically around the world, call it the longest point to point. The timely response is simply, 'it's a challenge based endeavour.' Truth is, I could probably squeeze another book out of that story alone, because it's not just about me, its a story of us, why are we (a minority, granted) inexplicably driven to travel?"
Man Travels The World
He also added, "Doing the math was tricky, the longer the route, the greater the error bars, and this was a ridiculously long route. As such, the numbers fell around 30,000 miles to 36,000 miles. It depended on a lot of fine grain details. I used route corridors, or clusters of routes, rather than a single focused route. Flexibility was going to be important. Every time I would measure a route, I would get a different number, such was the time distance involved. About 25 countries (again flexible), seven mountain ranges, a few deserts, one semi-frozen ocean etc."
Obviously, Bushby's travels around the world has had some logistical issues. He's had to figure out how to travel across large gaps of water without using transportation. He intentionally set that limitation for himself. Bushby identified three gaps he had to overcome. The first gap was called the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama. The second was the Bering Strait between the US and Russia, and the third gap is the Channel Tunnel between France and the United Kingdom.
Bushby's managed to complete the first two gaps. Though not without issues. The adventurer faced issues in Russia with his visa. That left him banned from the country for 5 years. It took 11 years to complete that leg of the journey. He also got arrested in Panama before.
He explained, "There were three 'Gaps', as we referred to them, that would physically link all these continents. The first was the little known, 'Darien gap'. This was the border region between Colombia and Panama. A few hundred miles of insanely dense pristine jungle run by drug lords and revolutionary guerrilla armies in a decades long conflict in Colombia."
Home
The second was the most worrying. The Bering Strait was in a league of its own. As I planned this journey, I had visited the Royal Geographic Society in London and looked over the archives for what information I could muster, nothing promising. Lots of stories involving failed attempts and the horrors involved. The Bering Strait was troubling, the last time this could have realistically been referred to as the Bering land bridge was about 20 to 25 thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age...maybe. (Technically we are still in an ice age, so call it the last Glacial maximum LGM, then most ice sheets were at their greatest extent)."
All Bushby has to do to finish his trip around the world and return home is to cross the English Channel. Given the waters and trains in the channel, it proves to be a challenge for the adventurer. Bushby will have to find a way to overcome it to finally return home after nearly three decades.
