Angela Maxwell and Karl Bushby have spent years walking around the world, occasionally together but mostly alone. This year, the duo took on their latest challenge: a 288km swim across the Caspian Sea.
The crossing is part of Bushby’s so-called Goliath Expedition, a decades-long walk around the world.
Bushby started in 1998 in Punta Arenas, Chile. His goal was to walk home to the UK. Since starting, there have been two rules: he cannot use any form of transport and cannot go home until he finishes.
Maxwell and Bushby had met years earlier while crossing the Gobi Desert. At the time, Maxwell was on her own 6.5-year solo walk. The two joined for a while, then parted ways.
Bushby’s often solitary journey is filled with logistical nightmares. The biggest of these came in Turkmenistan, where he couldn’t get a visa into neighboring Iran, his next country.
In the end, he gave up one of his initial rules: He flew to Los Angeles to figure out an alternative plan. Then the pandemic hit, and he was completely grounded.
Around this time, Maxwell decided to re-join him. They came up with a crazy plan. They would backtrack along his route to Uzbekistan, trek through the Kyzylkum desert, and then swim across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan. It was an incredible Plan B, but considering Bushby just wasn’t going to get into Iran, it was the only option. “Failure would be crippling,” he told the BBC.
The Caspian Sea crossing was far from straightforward. Maxwell admits she is not a natural swimmer, but swimming was not the hardest part of this challenge. “It wasn’t so hard physically,” she said, “it was definitely more the mentality.”
At the same time, Bushby admitted, “I’m definitely not a swimmer, nor do I like swimming.”
For both of them, this was completely outside their comfort zone. Over 32 days at sea, they spent 27 days swimming through dangerously rough seas and high winds. They dealt with mental exhaustion but in the end, they crossed from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan.
Safety boats supported them throughout the swim. They swam for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon and slept aboard the boats. Two young Azerbaijani swimmers, Abdurrahman Rustamov and 16-year-old Anastasia Boborkina, joined them.
Bushby’s journey. Photo: West Bound Horizons
When they weren’t swimming, they played dominoes on the boats. Sometimes, they said, they “just held on and tried to keep dinner down as their craft rocked violently.”
Bushby intends to continue walking into Europe and then back to the UK. It is not clear whether Maxwell will continue with him. Bushby admits the journey is getting harder, particularly the long periods by himself. It was something he did not expect to struggle with. When he will cross the finish line in Hull remains a mystery.
