Karl Bushby left the city’s Sutton Park estate in 1998 on an adventure of a lifetime
Karl Bushby in Alaska during his mammoth world trek(Image: Karl Bushby / SWNS)
A former paratrooper from Hull set out to become the first person to walk an unbroken path around the world. He thought it would take him 12 years, when he embarked on the challenge from his home in Newtondale, Sutton Park, in October 1998.
Almost 28 years later, Karl Bushby is on his way back. Having faced a jungle swarming with crocodiles and anacondas; a freezing crossing of the Bering Strait and 57 days in a Russian prison, during his 36,000-mile trek, there is probably not much that could faze the determined veteran.
He has reportedly been robbed, detained, deported, bitten, starved and nearly drowned on the journey that began because of a bet in a bar. He set out with a self-styled trolley to pull and push, which he named the Beast, and an idea that he would “walk home” from the southernmost tip of South America to Hull.
But as Karl has pointed out in one of his YouTube videos recording his travels, his Goliath Expedition actually began when he first ventured out of Newtondale and headed off towards the south coast of England. He took to the video-sharing platform to answer the people who have questioned why, after his amazing world travels on foot, he would want to head back to Hull – he expects to make it back to the city by September.
He said: “People want to know, apparently, why I’m going back to Hull, as if, you know, it’s a place you would never go to for some reason. But A, it’s my home town; B, it’s where I left from.
“When you think about how this journey began … it officially began on the southern tip of South America, yes, but we actually spent, I don’t know, two weeks maybe walking down south from the UK. I kind of, like, left home; the BBC were there and they filmed it.
“So you have me saying goodbye to family – most of whom [are] dead now, the people that were actually there wishing me goodbye – and walking off down my street, where I will return one day. Obviously, you have got to get that video of you coming back down that street, right?
“And back to my mother’s house from where it all began. Because we walked for basically those first two weeks to test the machine that I was pushing because we had just put it together. We got some engineering workshop to build the Beast One.
“So, that first few weeks down to the south … I go down there and I say goodbye to a girlfriend that I had in Kent; say goodbye to the guys still in the Army, then I head on a train to Brize Norton with my father and brother.
“So yeah, we’ve got to take it back to Hull. We’ve got to take it back and walk back down that street to where it all began.”
A picture from the Hull Daily Mail archive showing Karl Bushby setting out from Sutton Park on his global trek, on October 5, 1998 (Image: Hull Daily Mail)
Back when Hull was celebrating its year in the spotlight as the City of Culture 2017, the Hull Daily Mail managed to get a rare interview with the explorer, who was then in Mongolia. Even then he was saying it was time to start looking at the journey home to Hull – although he had put off thoughts of it for 18 years as it had always felt “such a long way off”.
Karl said at the time: “It’s time to start looking at the journey home. I could be home in three years, but it could take me a lot longer.
“I can still remember leaving my mum’s house in Hull in October 1998. It’s going to be very emotional walking back along that road.
“Hull certainly seems like a very different place to the one I left in ’98.” Incredibly, for a man taking on a 36,000-mile journey on foot, Karl said then he felt he did not quite measure up in the Army.
“I had a tough time keeping up with the other blokes,” he said. “When I joined, I was skinny. I looked like I was ten years old.
“My interests were not the same as other paras. I’ve always been into the sciences and nature. As a boy growing up in Hull, I would be out bird-spotting and collecting creatures.”
He said in the interview: “I’m proud to come from Hull. It’s still very difficult to find people in the world who have heard of the place and know where it is.
“Interestingly, the only person who has known where Hull is was a guy I met in the Atacama desert in Chile! He’s been to the UK and met someone from Hessle.
“But I get to tell the world a lot. I tell people about home, the place where my childhood memories were made.
“People in Hull put themselves down a lot. I hear that a lot. But a little self-confidence can get you a long way.”