Man Walks 31,000 Miles Home, Gets Told the Channel Tunnel Is Too Dangerous

Twenty-Eight Years, One Very Patient Woman

Bushby set off from Chile in 1998 with a simple rule: get back to his hometown of Hull entirely on foot. No planes. No cars. No ferries. Nothing with a motor. The whole thing came to roughly 31,000 miles across 30 countries, which is about 6,000 miles more than the circumference of the Earth, according to Good News Network.

He's 57 now. When he finally reached his mother Angela's gate in England, the media crowded in and she pulled him into a tearful hug. "You've changed a bit," he told her. "I'm older," she said. Then, the line that should be printed on a mug: "Well done for hanging in there."

Think about that. Twenty-eight years of waiting for your kid to come home from a walk. Some of us can't wait 28 minutes for a pizza.

The Resume Is Absurd

Let's run the highlights. Bushby crossed the Darien Gap, the brutal stretch of rainforest and mountains between Colombia and Panama that most people treat as a legend, not a route. He got arrested in Russia. Visa problems repeatedly forced him to stop and wait. He originally hoped to finish by 2012, which means the schedule slipped by about fourteen years.

In 2006 he and fellow adventurer Dimitri Kieffer made the first recorded crossing of the frozen Bering Strait on foot, swimming through ice floes where the ice gave out. Last year he swam more than 170 miles across the Caspian Sea, from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan, to avoid walking through Iran or Russia. It took a month.

He is, by any reasonable standard, the owner of the longest unbroken foot journey in history. Your last vacation involved a rental car and a complimentary breakfast.

Then Came the Tunnel Guys

Here's where the story takes a turn into pure bureaucratic comedy. Bushby was nearly home, standing on the French side of the Channel, with a 31-mile tunnel connecting him to England. He asked GetLink, the tunnel's operator, for permission to walk through the service tunnel running alongside it.

Denied. Their reasoning was that letting him walk it would pose a safety risk.

A man who survived the Darien Gap, a Russian arrest, and a month in the Caspian Sea was deemed too risky for a lit, ventilated, maintained service corridor. Meanwhile his own rules barred ferries or any mechanized transport, so the company had effectively handed him a choice: swim, or stay in France forever.

He Swam It Anyway

Bushby was not thrilled. He had joked that he'd rather take hostages than swim the Channel, and he made clear that swimming was not his favorite activity. The Channel is colder and wilder than the Caspian, and he'd already done enough swimming for one lifetime.

He did it anyway. Last month he spent 20 hours in the water over three days, resting on a safety vessel each night and returning to his last-known coordinates each morning, until he landed at Shakespeare Beach near Dover. That's the kind of stubbornness you only develop after nearly three decades of being told no by governments.

On November 2 he finally reached Hull's Queen Victoria Square, where local officials and hundreds of well-wishers greeted him like a modern folk hero. He pushed a cart loaded with medicine, sleeping bags, and a spare tire for the final three miles to his mother's house.

What the Man Actually Said

Bushby had every right to gloat. Instead he credited everyone else. "They say it takes a village, but it took a world to get me here," he said. "The kindness of strangers, so many, from individuals and nation states, to get me back here today."

That's a fairly generous summary from a guy who got arrested in Russia and rejected by a tunnel company. But it tracks. Nobody walks 31,000 miles without strangers handing over food, shelter, directions, and the occasional border pass. The trip was a 28-year experiment in whether people will help someone who just keeps showing up. Turns out they mostly will.