There was I feeling a bit concerned about leaving my wife behind for six weeks to walk from John ‘O Groats to Land’s End. She must be thankful, though, that she didn’t marry Karl Bushby, who yesterday returned to his mother’s home in Hull after 28 years walking 31,000 miles from the bottom of Chile back to Hull via the Americas, Russia and Mongolia.
There was a great welcoming party for him, involving a crowd of several hundred people, a guard of honour from the Army cadets and a banner which read ‘Be more Bushby’. But is that really such a good idea?
Even Bushby himself seems to have doubts about how he has spent the past three decades. He has suggested that, on reflection, it might have been a bit ‘selfish’ to flee the country, leaving his newly divorced wife to bring up their eight-year-old son – now 36 years old. To some, I think, she will be the greater hero. Bushby brushes off the neglect of his family by saying:
On balance I think it a good job that most of us don’t have too much Bushby in us
Be careful what it is you celebrate and who your heroes are. If you look at the lives of people like Shackleton and Cook and the others, they were horrible husbands and fathers.
Maybe, but even Shackleton didn’t desert his family for 28 years. And his polar expeditions were at least opening up new frontiers. Bushby’s journey only serves to underline how little of the world there is that remains unexplored. One of his much-reported feats was to cross the Darien Gap: a roadless thicket of rainforest which lies between Colombia and Panama, full of bandits and venomous snakes. Then again, I looked it up and saw that an estimated 520,000 people hiked across it in 2023. That’s twice the daily vehicle count on the busiest stretch of the M25.
Will Bushby even get a book deal or a Hollywood film? After the scandals of The Salt Path and Ffyona Campbell – who admitted to getting her boyfriend to drive her stretches of the US leg of her round the world ‘walk’ – publishers and film companies might be a bit more reluctant to splash out on tales of derring-do, just in case it turns out Bushby never really got further than Bridlington.
I’ll take him at his word, even if certain parts of his story don’t seem to add up. Bushby claims that he was walking at a rate of 18 miles a day. I know it is a long way around the world, but even so, at that rate it would take less than five years to walk 31,000 miles. On closer inspection, it turns out he shacked up with a Colombian girl for seven of those 28 years and a Japanese girl he met in Mongolia for a further three years. That still leaves approximately 13 years unaccounted for.
Bushby is also reported to have swum 184 miles across the Caspian Sea. What, still tugging his famous trolley behind him? Even if he did stick to his golden rule of not taking any form of transport on his journey, his luggage certainly must have done.
Bushby seems to be aware that his 15 minutes of fame might not last and now wonders whether he might get a job teaching science or something. Good luck with that: people in their late 50s aren’t having all that great a time in the jobs market at the moment, and he seems to know this. ‘I’ll be 57, living with my Mum with no job,’ he said on his return.
The more you look at Bushby’s journey, the more you wonder whether he has done it the wrong way around. He should have done what the rest of us do after a few youthful adventures: settled down and helped bring up his kid, established a career, made some money and then gone off on his travels again.
Be more Bushby? Okay, I’m a bit envious of his trek, but on balance I think it a good job that most of us don’t have too much Bushby in us. Once you’ve gasped at adventures such as crossing the Bering Strait you are left with a yet another hippie who has bummed around a heavily trodden world while leaving responsibilities to those he left behind.
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