KINGSTON HULL: British adventurer Karl Bushby enjoyed an emotional reunion with his mother and family on Monday as he arrived back home after a 28-year, 50,000-kilometre trek from South America, crossing four continents on foot.

Cheers erupted as the 57-year-old former paratrooper was greeted in the street outside his mother’s house in the northeastern UK port of Hull.

Bushby, who set off on his odyssey from Chile in 1998, had two golden rules for his journey — to avoid all forms of transport to advance and not return until he completed his challenge. He was met on Monday in the centre of Hull by a crowd of about 1,000 cheering people, and thanked everyone for all the support he had met along the way. “I didn’t do this alone,” he said, adding it was a “global effort”.

“You wouldn’t believe just how many people have been involved in this, to get us around the kinds of obstacles that we face. We’ve faced down governments, we’ve faced down some of the hardest challenges.”

The route back to his home city has seen him walk the length of the Americas, across the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia and then through parts of Central Asia and Europe, covering jungles, mountains and deserts.

He had already been applauded on Sunday as he crossed the iconic Humber Bridge near Hull in thick mist, ahead of his final push into the city centre and then on to his mother’s home.

Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2026