After 28 years walking across the globe, he's almost home | Hacker News Reader

After 28 years walking across the globe, he's almost home

nytimes.com

99 pointsrafaelc83 comments

Reminds me of a couple German who walked/hitchhiked across the globe and made a movie of while doing so: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weit._Die_Geschichte_von_einem...

They get a baby in the middle of it but keep going (maybe changing the rules a little ^.^). Still inspiring and heart-warming.

Gift article (requires login, but no subscription):

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/world/europe/karl-bushby-...

This is a crazy story. 28 years. Crossing the Bering Strait by foot, swimming across the English Channel after they didn't let him walk through the Channel Tunnel, etc. I wonder what his main source of income is/was.

re Income: Apparently, it was the kindness of other humans. In the NYT article, he noted that discovering people are generally kind was his greatest lesson.

Bushby has had actual sponsorships, and also sold the rights to a book from a major publisher (all well documented), so you shouldn't read his remark as just bludging off locals for decades.

Rather, any longterm overland traveler, even if they can pay their own way and are even posh, will encounter situations where local people want to extend hospitality and do something to help you, even if they are of much more modest means. Sometimes this isn't actually helping you, because you'd rather sort your own accommodation and food and have downtime to yourself, whereas being a guest requires socializing and energy, but you feel compelled to accept because people want to be seen as kind and generous.

To sum it up in one word: visas.

Turns out walking thousands of miles is the easy part.

for another source,

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/exhibition-charts-karl-...

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby

I’ve driven my personal vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents. It’s not that hard.

Sounds like you won the passport lottery.

Some citizens are not as fortunate to live in a country which issues passports accepted in so many places.

I also won the passport lottery.

One of the world's most active overland travel scenes in the 1990s and early millennium was in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. These travelers had relatively weak passports, but they started with the countries that would let them in, and then they eventually used that travel experience to visit more discriminating countries (those are more likely to issue a visa if they see you have a passport full of stamps yet always went back home). This is why so much of the travel-book industry about overlanding far-flung countries is in Polish or Russian, not English. There were -- and still are -- organized clubs to help people out with this. Where there is a will, there is a way.

I don’t know. I had to apply for visas at embassies for like 20 of those in a row, around $150 USd each.

It's a bit mysterious how did he get from Russia to Mexico in 2006? The official website linked says just "displaced".

Bushby's walk has been extensively covered in the press (and in his own book about the Americas leg). Mexico served as his base while waiting for visas, permissions, and sponsorship, so he was flying back there and then, once he could continue, he flew back to the exact coordinates he had left off and started walking again from there.

Had a developer who worked for me who did something very similar. Lived all over the world, would get short term visas, and return to Mexico if needed to await his next visa. He had a friend that let him use his mailing address for work and mail and slept on his couch or in hostels while awaiting a new visa. He loved the life. Lived on a dozen different beaches while he was working for me. Apparently a Mexican visa is one of the easiest to get.

aren't you supposed to be legal resident in the country where you're applying for your visa...

Isn't that a crime?

Under which legal system?

When I enter a country outside the EU they usually as me if I want to go their for vacation or work.

I had the impression, that would prevent people from travelling countries and working there without work visa.

> sponsorship

The first thing that always crosses my mind when I see these feats of endurance - walking for weeks/months/years is always how the hang did they pay their way - food, accommodation (even if it's just a tent) clothing, medical supplies, none of it's free

I think the commenter was referring to visa sponsorship. Visa sponsorship is a bit more involved than just money. Someone is putting their name on government paperwork saying that if something goes wrong with this visitor, all bills can be forwarded to me. It isn't like a goFundMe or Kickstarter where a whole bunch of people are chipping in on a person or project; it is one person putting their livelihood on the line to vouch for that visitor's trustworthiness. And if the country requires sponsorship for their visa program, and no one is willing (or if you don't know a single person in that country), you cannot enter.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=visa+sponsorship+meaning&ia...

No, I was speaking about general sponsorship of his expedition costs (which got expensive starting from the Bering Strait), not visa sponsorship.

I haven't heard of it until this fall.

I found a copy of Giant Steps in a European bookshop circa 2008, so he was never an obscure figure. In any event, within the overland travel community especially, Bushby comes up occasionally for his walking across the Darien Gap (a region which is the bane of people traveling up or down the Americas), as well as for his Bering Strait crossing.

Is it? He took a plane, surely

That's what I thought but then the article says it's supposed to be "with unbroken footsteps". I thought that literally was impossible in modern society and i guess it is

The article says he would “decamp” to Mexico at times and then pick up where he had left off. I read this as he’d take a break and fly (presumably) to Mexico and then fly back to where he left off.

Depends on what you mean by “unbroken”.

I’d assume that when he ran into legal issues like after crossing the Bering Strait the authorities would transport him via a car or bus so it’s not like he never took a motorized transport.

People always assume he's been walking continuously for all these years, and it's understandable because the headlines are always written to imply that.

He doesn't. He walks some, marks where he stopped, takes a break, continues from where he left off.

Was he able to keep the same trolley for the entire journey?

if you replace each part of a trolley - one part at a time over the course of a quarter decade ... is it still the same trolley it was in the beginning?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Strange how there is randomness to if a story catches on or not. I posted about this 10 months ago and got no traction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46176842

msnbc lost the link, but it was this article

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/british-globe...

Not just randomness, but also time and day of the week, the source (domain), and quality of the writing (enough to make the first few users to upvote before the submission gets dropped from the first page).

Also important: the title. If the title strikes a nerve, even a crap article will occasionally get upvoted.

I think HN reposts links that are “interesting” from users with a certain level of “karma” and I imagine from places that have a certain level of “authority” - wish I could gift you the karma points

Karma isn't a factor. Nor is authority. Just interestingness! That's really all we care about.

In this case someone emailed us and recommended this post for the SCP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).

I wonder how his now 36-year-old son who was 8 when his father left to do this for no reason feels about it.

Does doing a lot of walking make it acceptable to leave your young kid and go globetrotting for 30 years?

I know this kind of thing brings up strong emotions for most people—it does for me too—but you can't fairly judge another person's intimate relationships* from the handful of details that appear in a news article, and responding with personal denunciation is against both HN's rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and its intended spirit.

We mostly don't know why other people do what they do, nor what they've gone through themselves, and we tend to be harshest and most uncharitable when we know the least.

Does that mean that the family impact of taking such a path in life should be off-topic in a thread like this? Not at all. But to be within HN's guidelines and (more importantly) its intended spirit, you should do it differently—not in a condemnatory way, but in a wondering way, and perhaps drawing connections to one's own experience, which always helps.

The goal is to have a curious conversation, rather than a reductive one. That's always the goal here! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

(* assuming one can ever do that, or that it's one's place to try)

Why not ask his son, who has joined him on sections of his walk, or at least read the abundant press coverage about the two and why Bushby was unable to follow his infant son to Northern Ireland?

Within the overland-travel community, Bushby comes up often enough and people actually talk about his walk, getting visas, crossing borders, interacting with local people. It's a good demonstration of how toxic general social media like Reddit (or, now, HN) is for substantial discussion that people try to move the discussion instead to the personal merits of the person.

As a retired cycle tourist myself who hosted a few world-spanning cyclists and a friend of a well known late Italian Vespa globetrotter, I would say: this is actually the critical audience (often subconsciously) personally justifying why their own life is so boring: "my way is the right way: everyone else is irresponsible". Deep down they feel threatened by the notion that their life may be boring BECAUSE OF THEIR OWN DAMN CHOICES. News at 9.

But yeah, they are all half-mad or worse (read: "interesting people"); military service isn't going to have zero impact either, people deal with it different ways.

I find it telling he doesn't have flags on his kit.

Many qualities of people who accomplish extraordinary things do not correlate with strong interpersonal relationships. The comment was a little overly judgmental so I totally understand your comments, but put politely, it isn't particularly unreasonable.

Absentee parenting is a novel concept; in ages prior it was the norm. That said, I'm on board with being there for the kids, all the evidence is positive. Unless you're English, in which case: chin up, keep calm and carry on! That's another contributing factor: the guy possibly went to boarding school.

Yes, a lot of things were the norm in "ages prior" that aren't considered great nowadays.

He couldn't go to Belfast because he was active duty in the British military.

But, he left the army to do his around the world walk, which means that he could have left the army and gone to Belfast instead.

He and his adult son have a good relationship now seemingly, but that doesn't mean his son didn't need a dad growing up. Having said that, it seems like this dude had a whole slew of mental issues, so perhaps it was for the best that he wasn't around his son much while he was growing up.

“Temporarily unable to go to Northern Ireland” doesn’t justify abandoning your child for the entire rest of his life.

There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.

In so many of these stories, once the parent and child have publicly reconciled as Bushby and his son have, the child is very annoyed by total strangers on social media continuing to harp on abandonment or injustice; it feels like an intrusion into their personal life that hbn or smt88 knows nothing about. So, you might want to ask whether your intervention here is actually sought.

Reflects a lot better on the son than his selfish old man; he's fortunate he's seemingly turned out so well.

Well maybe public judgement of a father abandoning their child will stop it from happening to a child in the future.

I'm sorry, but: Post-hoc justification.

This entire discussion is post hoc, unless you're assuming that everyone who is commenting here happened to also have criticized him publicly in the past. There's no statute of limitations for people voicing their opinion on something they just learned about from a while back.

What?

The son forgiving his father doesn’t make him a good father.

Good fathers don’t need to reconcile in the first place.

I don’t know what your weird beef is here, but abandoning your son to do something incredibly pointless is selfish and terrible parenting.

"My weird beef" is hoping people will talk about Bushby's walk, which is legendary in overland travel circles and full of interesting details of local people, local customs, geography and geology, instead of trying to turn this into yet another social-media harangue of a person's personal flaws. What the man saw on his walk would probably be more interesting for a community of intellectual curiosity like HN (and look at dang's response above) than the man himself.

Sorry I don’t see it the same way. I don’t see a hero or admirable life’s work. He spent his life choosing himself over others.

Again, there is more to talk about than the man himself or his walk as his personal "life's work" . The regions he moved through, things like the Darien Gap in the early millennium, are often of great interest to the HN crowd, and these facts are discussed in the coverage of his walk.

> There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.

I never understood why people are so willing to advertise their lack of imagination.

If you need “imagination” to prove that this guy was a good dad, he wasn’t a good dad.

What a ridiculous and childish snipe lol.

Then dazzle the discussion with your creativity.

No matter what, a kid needs his parents as a kid (in normal healthy families). There is not a case that I can imagine where not having them is good.

The fact that he gtew up to be a man much, much more mature than his father just shows he is the better person. And absolutely nothing on the father.

> [...] a kid needs his parents [...] There is not a case that I can imagine where not having them is good.

Now read your comment again, slowly.

Thank you for being condescending, this helps the conversation.

Could you please point out in the comment I was responding to where you found this quote?

And maybe refer to

>Why not ask his son, who has joined him on sections of his walk, or at least read the abundant press coverage about the two and why Bushby was unable to follow his infant son to Northern Ireland?

which true to explain how great the relationship was once the kid grew up?

The stories where bad parents just swoop in late in childhood and have a great relationship with their kids is frustrating. As a parent you would like to think the monumental task of raising a newborn from birth through the first 5 years would create some kind of lasting connection between you and your kid.

It is a ton of sacrifice and they won't recognize it until they have kids themselves. The reality is they can resent you as a teen and become endeared with a step or absent parent if they are more "fun" in the moment.

Acceptable? No, but some people realize too late that they want an alternative mode of existence. As somebody who had abusive parents, I would rather they had pursued their desires.

I imagine the conversation went something like:

"Hey dad, what's this trip I hear you talking about?"

"Well son, even though you're 8 years old, I've decided to spend the next 28 years walking around the world."

"Gee dad, that sure seems like a long walk. Are you sure about this?"

"Well of course I'll be taking breaks rather than doing the whole thing at once."

"Great, so you'll be able to visit me, your 8 year old son, right?"

"Nope! I've decided to add my own self-imposed rule that I can't visit the UK until I've completed my walk. Instead, whenever I don't feel like walking, I'm going to fly to Mexico and hang out there. Then when I do feel like walking again, I'll fly back to where I was and resume my walk."

"So you're leaving me, your 8 year old son, to go on a 28 year long, non-contiguous walk around the world where you'll rarely see me? And by the time I grow up we'll barely know each other? And you'll end up missing the birth of your granddaughter?"

"That's right, son! I hope you're excited for the first of 4 times we'll see each other, 6 years from now! Aren't you proud of your dad for being such a great explorer?"

"..."

This walk is fairly tame in risk of death. Not so much in time lost as a dad.

This is a very common archetype though: dad of young kids does risky outside adventure for self-aggrandizement > dies.

the upcoming doc Everest: The Other Side will be fascinating.

Hilaree Nelson & Jim Morrison had a pretty crazy expedition goal. Then she dies while training to do it together.

He continues on anyways.

A bit of nuance: IIRC he previously lost his ex and kids in a horrible non-mountaineering car crash.

But IIRC Hilaree had children she left behind.

The film looks beautiful though.

Which is part of the problem... The inspired by jimmy's cinematography -> alex's feats -> become a wannabe amateur free solo father who dies is well established by now lol

My dad is friends with one of the main rabbis in JH. has done probably 20+ "He died doing what he loved" speeches, as the wife and kids sob and are left with no income stream.

I think I read (maybe on a wikipedia article about this project) that he was already pretty much an absent father before even starting this walk.

I don't know, does being the Buddha? (He also named his son Fetter, for extra comedic effect.)

This guy had a baby not too long before this and just left it behind. We should really stop talking this guy, he's not a great person as far as I'm concerned.

There has been plenty of press coverage of how Bushby was unable to see the child, because the mother took the child to Northern Ireland where Bushby was unable to follow due to his military status.

> We should really stop talking this guy, he's not a great person as far as I'm concerned.

So what? Should we talk only about good guys? Even if he's shitty person (I'm not sure if he is - maybe he's not, I'm not making this judgement) the story is still interesting.

Love hearing from the morality police in face of such incredible feat of human effort and ingenuity.

No one who embarks in such an adventure is a ‘well-adjusted’ person, and their personal demons are theirs to face. Yet it is so simple for many to just point and blame at someone else’s fault instead of just appreciating what single-minded effort is able to achieve.

I well expect to be downvoted, as the modern internet culture revels in blame and negativity. Any achievement an opportunity to demolish it. The Puritan morality is stronger than ever. “Let the sinless one among you throw the first stone.”

Congrats to this person, and hope they have learned something about themselves and their place in the world.

Yes congratulation on his pointless endeavour that's improved no-one's life at all (maybe his own?)

i would think that a man like him doesn't really have a natural concept of "home".

See also [1] - Simon Hattenstone's interview with Karl Bushby

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/oct/13/karl-bu...

Arthur Blessitt

38 years, 5 months, 20 days

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Blessitt

To clarify, Arthur Blessitt is not the subject of the NYT article.

Karl Bushby is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby

Actually, the subject is ‘After 28 years walking across the globe, he’s almost home’. I found it curious that someone else would walk for as long as 38 years, and I don’t see any conflict with the subject.

Yeah... not actually objecting to you bringing him up, but I was briefly confused (longer than it should have been as I had some trouble getting the NYT artictle to load), and I thought the point was worth clarifying.

For some reason I don't care about this story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com