British adventurer Karl Bushby has arrived in Istanbul after walking nearly 50,000 kilometers (31,065 miles) over the last 26 years as part of a decades-long journey which began in Chile and aims to demonstrate that intercontinental travel can be completed entirely on foot.
“I speak to people all the time who just tell me that Türkiye would be a fantastic country, so I never had any doubts that it wouldn’t be. It was ingrained in me that Türkiye was going to be what it was, and it has been great,” Bushby said.
Bushby, 56, set out in 1998 to become the first person to walk and swim across the Americas, Asia and Europe continents without using motorized transportation. His journey has been the subject of several documentaries.
Starting in Chile, Bushby’s journey included crossing the treacherous Darien Gap, a dense jungle between Colombia and Panama that is said to be impassable, which took nearly four years to complete.
He crossed the Panama Canal into North America, walking through Mexico, the U.S. and Canada before reaching Alaska. In 2006, he walked across the frozen Bering Strait to Russia.
Bushby was later detained in Russia for entering without proper travel documents, and he spent nearly two months in custody. Despite the occasional brief flight due to visa issues, he always resumed his walk from the same spot where he had left off.
He continued through Mongolia and Central Asia until he reached the Caspian Sea, where he swam for part of the time and rested on a small boat.
He then walked through Georgia and into Türkiye, arriving in Istanbul’s Üsküdar district after a three-month journey across the country to finish the Asian leg of his adventure. He is now awaiting permission to enter Europe, either on foot and over the bridge or by swimming across the Bosporus.
Bushby said he hopes to walk another 3,000 kilometers to France before swimming across the English Channel to complete his journey home to the U.K.
Dangerous terrain, obstacles
Bushby told AA that his journey was not motivated by a philosophical purpose, but rather by the challenge and desire to achieve the impossible.
He discussed that the most difficult parts of his decades-long journey were the Darien Gap and Russia, saying: “That section of jungle from Colombia into Panama, under the nose of the guerrillas during the civil war, was a lot of trouble but at the same time an incredible adventure and an achievement.”
He added: “Then, of course, crossing the Bering Sea is very dangerous.”
He recalled that when he entered Russia from Alaska, the Russian authorities “were not that particularly impressed, and that became a problem. It became a 57-day detention problem, which became a political crisis. So that became a bit of an issue, but eventually we got beyond that and we were allowed to continue.”
Throughout his 26-year journey, he faced war zones, visa bans, pandemics, and economic hardships, but he emphasized that he never gave up.
Bushby noted that the early years were especially tough, saying: “For the first couple of years, especially in South America, it was really tough. Then in Central America, things got a little bit easier.”
But by the time he reached the border with the U.S., Bushby said people had been following his story and began to take it seriously. “Then we got our first kind of sponsorship,” he said, describing them as “very small deals” and “handshake deals,” but not an official sponsorship.
Warm welcome
Describing his three-month journey in Türkiye so far, Bushby said he went “from the coast of Georgia down through Türkiye, and then along the coast all the way to Samsun, and then you come inland, and then all the way here to Istanbul.”
Referring to the Turks’ famous hospitality, Bushby said the people have made up for the long trek, emphasizing: “The people have been fantastic.”
“Long before I got to Türkiye, a lot of travelers that I would meet would tell me about Türkiye and tell me that when you get there, you’re going to have trouble advancing in Türkiye because everyone wants to bring you in, give you tea and coffee, and you’ll be talking to people all day. And it really was kind of like that,” Bushby added.
He said he came to a park in the Üsküdar district, where locals immediately offered him food and tea, moving him deeply.
“They haven’t seen me. They didn’t know what I was doing, but that’s just an example, a perfect example of every day they’ll see a stranger and they’ll just offer you something like that. Some countries you don’t see that,” he said.
“Thank you to everybody in Türkiye who has just done a great deal to help me on the road … And, I really look forward and hope that I can talk to the local government here and hopefully we can come to an arrangement and take a walk across this bridge,” Bushby added.