Karl Bushby returns home to northern England after a 28-year, 31,000-mile walk around the world

HULL, England (AP) — Karl Bushby was taking the final steps Monday of his 28-year odyssey to walk around the world and return to his mother's home in Northern England.

Bushby was surrounded by journalists as hundreds of people cheered his arrival at City Hall.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he joked. “Is that it, is it done?”

Bushby was a 29-year-old ex-paratrooper when he walked from his home to a Royal Air Force base near Oxford and caught a flight to South America. He returned as a 57-year-old — softer, grayer and weathered, but far more worldly.

“They say it takes a village but literally it took a world to get me here,” Bushby said. “The kindness of strangers, so many, from individuals to nation states to get me back here today. I didn’t do this alone. There was a big team. The biggest team. Earth.”

Bushby set out from Punta Arenas, Chile, on Nov. 1, 1998, and has walked 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) across four continents and 30 countries to get home. He navigated shifting ice over the Bering Strait and swam across the Caspian Sea and English Channel to avoid taking a boat or plane — or any transport — to propel him forward.

He had a thirst for adventure, but his mission only came into focus when his father, Keith, sent him a birthday card in the mid-90s. His dad, an army veteran himself, mentioned an argument among his fellow special forces troops about the possibility of walking from London to New York over the Bering land bridge, believed by some scientists to have been used by early humans to migrate from Asia to the Americas at a time of lower sea levels.

Perilous jungles, scorching deserts and frozen tundra slowed him down, but bureaucratic red tape often brought his adventure to a halt for long periods.

Bushby originally calculated the distance could be covered in about five years, but he knew that was unrealistic.

“You just dump a whole bucket full of reality on that,” he said. “We suspected that it was 12 years plus. And the plus was a big plus. But never in our wildest dreams would we ever have imagined 28 years.”

He dodged war in the dangerous Darién Gap, the roadless and rugged jungle, rainforest and mountains between South and Central America in 2001, and was then jailed for 18 days after crossing a restricted border zone in Panama.

After being airlifted to safety during the 56-mile (90-kilometer) Bering Strait crossing in 2006 with American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer, they started again and faced a standoff with a polar bear, survived near-death plunges into freezing waters and almost lost all their supplies when their sleds plunged in the sea. After managing the rare crossing, the pair were jailed and faced deportation for entering Russia illegally.

It took Bushby almost 10 years to make his way through Russia in fits and starts because of visa struggles and weather that only allowed travel only a few months a year. When Russia denied him a visa in 2012, Bushby walked in protest from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., which eventually led to him getting the proper paperwork.

Bushby planned to meet with family, including his son, Adam, whom he has only seen only a few times over the journey. He was expected to meet his 12-year-old granddaughter for the first time.

Then he was off to push his two-wheeled cart the final steps across Hull and reunite with his mother, Angela, whom he hadn't seen in a decade.

“It’s been a week of lasts,” Bushby told the crowd. “The last day in the tent. The last day on the road. After 28 years you couldn’t ask for more than this. This is the last of the last few steps almost to my mother’s house.”

Melley reported from London.