After 28 years, almost 50,000km of travel and one final, unexpected swim, Karl Bushby is back on British soil. The 57-year-old British adventurer reached Shakespeare Beach, south of Dover, on October 5 after swimming across the Channel from France to England. Unlike most Channel swimmers, he did not do this as a single swim, and swam in a wetsuit. In total, he spent around 20 hours in the water over three days, overnighting on a boat and restarting from his last position every morning.
“It feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years,” Bushby told ITV News. “It hasn’t been easy, and that’s part of the point — proving I’m more capable than I give myself credit for. All of us can accomplish more than we will ever imagine.”
Photo: Karl Bushby/Instagram
The logistics behind the swim were far more complicated than the actual crossing. For months, Bushby has been trying to put together a plan to make it back to England. He had originally hoped to walk through the Channel Tunnel, but despite his pleas, the request was rejected. Since his project does not allow him to use any vehicle — including self-propelled ones like kayaks — that left him with one viable option: swimming. The problem was that French rules prohibit swimming the Channel from the French coast to Britain.
Permit confusion
In September, Bushby and his team believed they had secured an exemption, only to discover, as he approached the coast, that the permission had not actually been finalized.
“We thought we got permission to swim from the coast of France. Turned out that is not the case,” he told AFP, and admitted he was in a “semi-panicked state” about the situation. After negotiations with French authorities, the necessary permissions were eventually secured, although he has not yet released any details about this.
Bushby emerges from the water after swimming the Channel. Photo: Karl Bushby/Instagram
Even though he is back in the UK, the expedition is not finished yet. Bushby still has to walk 400km from the south coast of England to his mother’s home in Hull. He left that house in 1998 and has not been back since.
Bushby began the Goliath Expedition on November 1, 1998, when he left Punta Arenas in southern Chile. At the time, he expected the journey to take roughly 12 years. The idea was relatively simple but not at all easy — walk around the world without using transport and without returning home until the walk was complete.
Much longer than planned
Going well beyond the initial 12-year timeline, the journey instead stretched across nearly three decades. Bushby traveled north through South and Central America, crossed the Darien Gap, and continued through North America to Alaska. In 2006, he and Dimitri Kieffer crossed the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia. He then spent years trying to cross Russia before heading into Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan.
COVID, visa issues, and various geopolitical circumstances have slowed him down considerably and forced him to pause multiple times. In many instances, he retreated to Mexico until he could resume the walk.
This is also not the first time he has had to resort to swimming. When he was unable to cross from Turkmenistan into Iran, he backtracked along his route to Uzbekistan, crossed the Kyzylkum Desert, and then swam across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan. Since then, he has walked through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Belgium, and France.
Bushby’s route.Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Finally back in the UK, he was met on the beach by a small group of family and friends, including his father and brothers. Now able to think about life after the Goliath expedition, he told AFP, “I’ve got to try and get established in the grown-up world again, because I’m going to arrive home with nothing.”
