I joined Karl Bushby on his round-the-world walk

I joined Karl Bushby on his round-the-world walk

Adventurer Karl Bushby has spent 28 years walking around the world, and the finish line is now within reach.

I have written about him for most of that time, yet although we have spoken often and exchanged hundreds of emails, we had never met.

We are in the village of Havré, and I am accompanying Karl on a five-mile (8km) walk to Mons. It is part of the final push to Calais, where he intends to swim across the English Channel in October.

Wearing shorts and a T-shirt marked by a roadside repair, Karl - with his grey beard - appears in the car park of a Belgian railway station.

He is pushing a trolley loaded with camping gear and other necessities.

Karl set out from Chile, aiming to make his way back home to Hull, under two self-imposed rules: he cannot use transport to move forward, and he cannot return to the UK until the walk is finished.

Sweat is beginning to show through his T-shirt, creating wing-like patches over his shoulder blades.

The former paratrooper began in November 1998, expecting the journey back to his childhood home, where his mother still lives, to take around 12 years.

Now, some 28 years later, he is still on the road, slowed by visa restrictions, the 2008 financial crash that cost him sponsors, Covid-19 and geopolitics.

The 57-year-old has travelled more than 30,000 miles (more than 48,000km), and a swim across the English Channel now awaits after Channel Tunnel bosses rejected his request for access to a service tunnel.

Karl ducks into a shop and emerges with a bottle of water, tossing it under a bungee cord attached to his trolley, which he made in Nicaragua early in the adventure. The Beast, as he calls it, is his lifeline.

We keep up a brisk pace. In 30C heat, I struggle to stay with him, while Karl shows no sign of tiredness despite having walked 10 miles before lunch.

We talk about how he crossed the frozen Bering Strait in 2006 with French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer and about his 186-mile swim across the Caspian Sea.

Discussing his crossing of the Darién Gap, which links Colombia and Panama, Karl says: "You're having to push through a dense jungle.

"You've got these river systems and lots of swamps. Laid over the top of that you've got the fact that it's a warzone."

Facing the threat of kidnap, Karl tried to make himself look homeless.

"Homeless people are pretty much invisible, nobody pays attention to them, so that was our intent.

"I did not want to be the blond-haired, blue-eyed gringo with the latest North Face equipment.

"I dyed my hair and skin and reduced my clothing to tatters. I carried my stuff in sacks."

A woman looks out of a window, bemused by the sight of two men and a trolley.

Karl asks me to push The Beast for a short while. The black fabric tape wrapped around the handle is worn and peeling.

With every mile, our conversation grows more philosophical.

I ask him what the biggest lessons have been on the walk.

"Tenacity is emperor," he replies.

Karl struggles to manoeuvre The Beast past a line of parked cars. "These towns can be fun assault courses," he sighs.

Returning to the question, he adds: "Coming from a military background, you don't necessarily see the best in people, so it has really been an eye-opener.

"From day one, I have been received with open arms from the rest of the world."

Karl says he has been out to prove to himself and others what he can do.

He speaks of the "kindness of strangers", saying one family in Chile became "almost like a second family".

"They were driving out for eight hours at a time to find me and feed me on the side of the road," he recalls.

I reach into my rucksack and take out a letter from Karl's mother, Angela Bushby. The bag also contains packets of his favourite sweets.

"Mother remembers," he laughs, choosing the caramel wafers.

The pair last met in 2015.

"You're still her little boy, aren't you?" I ask.

"Apparently so," says Karl. "A very happy little boy with all that chocolate."

In the letter, Angela asks whether he really must swim the Channel. Both mother and son know the answer.

And then comes a line that says a great deal.

"You used to think you were useless. Well, you have proven you're not," Angela has written.

I have always known Karl to be self-deprecating, but this leaps from the page.

He says he never felt as fit as his fellow comrades during his Army days.

Karl, whose father served in the SAS, says the Army helped build his confidence, but the "damage was done" in his early childhood, when undiagnosed dyslexia made him a target for bullies.

"I had no confidence," he says. "I was an underachiever. My dyslexia was not identified until my last year in school."

Karl, however, has never doubted that he could complete his journey.

"There is definitely this sense of wanting to prove myself," he says. "To myself and others. We're talking about doing something other people couldn't even dream of doing."

For years, Karl has been relaxed about the end date. Not anymore. There is now a real urgency.

"It's definitely time to call it a day," he says. "I don't want to keep this going for much longer."

We reach Mons and the impressive Grand-Place, where several young people, recognising him from his Instagram account, head straight for him.

"Oh my God, you are a legend," one excited young man tells Karl.

Karl says he is now recognised everywhere because of social media.

Does the future scare Karl?

"Yes," he admits. "One day I'm going to wake up in my mother's house – 57 years old with nothing but my stuff in a bag next to the bed."

We arrive at a cafe and Karl orders an orange juice.

I ask him what the hardest part of the journey has been, but instead of blisters or fears about crime, he says: "It's the relationships. I've fallen in love twice, lost them, and that leaves marks.

"The physical pain stuff – yeah, that's all doable. In terms of falling in love and then having to just carry on the walk? You're going to lose it."

He says he gets a "real buzz from a good horizon".

It will surely not get much better than the first sight of the white cliffs of Dover.

As we stand in a beautiful square, with the famous Belfry of Mons towering above us, I ask Karl whether he ever stops to truly take in the views.

"Sometimes you just don't have the energy," he admits.

"In a place like this, you'll take it in. You'd be surprised how many times I found myself in a place reminding myself I will never be here again."

I hope our paths will cross again... on English soil.