Karl Bushby, 57, is just 30 miles from home in Hull after spending 28 years walking around the world, and has admitted he is not sure what he will do when the journey ends.
Bushby was 29 when he began his walk back to Hull from the tip of South America on November 1, 1998. Since then, he has covered 31,000 miles across four continents, survived a standoff with a polar bear, floated through crocodile-infested waters in Colombia, come under attack from an angry mob in Peru, and was rescued by helicopter from an ice floe drifting out to sea in the Bering Strait.
Final Stretch Through Lincolnshire
He is currently making his way through the Lincolnshire countryside with a trolley loaded with camping gear, and will be staying with his mum, Angela, when he finally returns to Humberside.
Karl said: "My purpose and reason for living is about to end. It's going to be difficult - trying to blend back into a society that you just don't know anymore."
The former paratrooper's mission was sparked by a birthday card from his father, Keith, in the mid 1990s. Keith, an Army veteran himself, mentioned an argument special forces troops once had about the possibility of walking from London to New York over the Bering land bridge, a frozen section of the Pacific between Alaska and Siberia.
Journey Rules and Early Challenges
Karl set two strict rules for his journey - he could not use any form of transport to move forward, and he had to return home on foot. In 1998, he set out with £300 and soon found himself fighting hurricane-force winds on the Patagonian Steppe.
He then dodged a civil war in the dangerous Darien Gap, the perilous rainforest and mountain range that divides the American continent. In 2001, he was jailed for 18 days after crossing a restricted border zone in Panama.
When he finally took on the Bering Strait crossing in 2006 with American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer, he survived a near-fatal plunge into freezing waters, and nearly lost all of his supplies. Once the pair made it across, they were jailed and faced deportation for entering Russia illegally.
Setbacks and Kindness Along the Way
It took almost 10 years to get through Russia because of visa issues and fierce weather conditions that only allowed travel a few months a year. When Russia denied him a visa in 2012, Mr Bushby walked in protest from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, which eventually led to him getting the proper paperwork. Each time he faced a setback in Russia, he would retreat to the US or Mexico to save on costs, and wait for his next chance to return to the point where he left off.
He was trailed by police through China, suffered a lengthy setback during the Covid pandemic and was forced to swim 31 days across the Caspian Sea because geopolitical problems had closed off Russia and Iran.
Karl has also found love on his journey, spending seven years with a Colombian woman, and three with a woman from Japan - though his nomadic lifestyle means neither relationship survived the test of time. The adventurer has a son from his first marriage who mostly grew up without him during his trip, and is now in his mid-30s.
His dad was there to meet him on the beach in Dover when he swam the channel on October 5 - but Bushby hasn't seen his mother in a decade. Karl's journey hit a financial obstacle when sponsors pulled out after the 2008 financial crisis, and for the past 16 years, he has relied mainly on a US media company, who are producing a documentary by filmmaker Werner Herzog.
Drivers were seen waving at him and beeping their horns as he walked past Market Rasen this week, while a group of motorcyclists stopped to take selfies. Karl spoke of the kindness he has encountered on every leg of the journey, whether that was being welcomed into shacks assembled from car parts, nursed back to health from a bad stomach infection by a Peruvian doctor's family, or the hundreds of meals he has been given by strangers who want nothing in return.
"I've been welcomed in by the poorest of the poor," he said. "I've met 99.9999% of the very best of humanity. Every culture, every country has been the same response."
