About The Long Way Home
On Monday 5 October 2026, a 57-year-old former paratrooper named Karl Bushby walked out of the English Channel onto Shakespeare Beach near Dover. He had left Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile, on 1 November 1998, aiming to walk an unbroken line around the world to his mother’s home near Hull. It took nearly 28 years, about 50,000 km and 29 countries — and two swims, because he wasn’t allowed a boat.
This site is a one-day tribute to that walk, made while the world is talking about it. It is fan-made and not affiliated with Karl Bushby, his team, or Werner Herzog’s documentary Walk of Life.
What’s here
- The game — an expedition game in the spirit of classic trail games. 18 chapters follow the real route, with real setbacks from Karl’s walk as story events, 50+ random road events, three difficulty modes, and four crossings played as mini-games: the Darién Gap, the Bering Strait sea ice, the Caspian Sea and the English Channel. Your progress is saved in your browser so you can resume, and your result becomes a shareable link and a downloadable card.
- The route — 31 milestones on a map centred on the Pacific so the westward route draws as one line.
- Your steps — a calculator for how long the same distance would take you.
- The quiz — 40 questions, 10 per round.
How the game simplifies reality
The game is a game. Chapter distances are rounded so they add up to roughly 50,000 km; pace, food costs, visa lengths and event odds are invented for play. Most players finish far faster than 28 years, because no game can model years of real sponsorship hunts, closed borders, court cases and a pandemic. Date-based events (the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 pandemic) only hit you if your in-game calendar is still on the road when they arrive — just like they hit Karl.
The rules mirror his: nothing motorised on the route; off-route travel (such as flying out to renew a visa) is fine as long as you come back to the exact spot. Pack animals carrying your load are fine; riding them isn’t.
Sources
Facts about the expedition come from these reports (accessed 10 October 2026):
- Wikipedia — Karl Bushby (route, dates, Bering Strait, detentions, ban, Caspian swim, European leg)
- ExplorersWeb — Karl Bushby is back in the UK after swimming the Channel
- ExplorersWeb — Karl Bushby begins home stretch (the two rules, Darién Gap, Gobi, Caspian, quotes)
- ExplorersWeb — English Channel could halt Karl Bushby’s walk (Channel Tunnel request)
- AFP via Gulf News — back on UK soil after 28-year walk (29 countries, Herzog, Walk of Life)
- ITV News — man who set out to walk globe back in UK 28 years later
- AOL — How Karl Bushby battled English Channel doubts (swim quotes)
- AFP via Cyprus Mail — globe trekker faces changed world (Instamatic camera, social media)
Where sources differ (for example, distance quoted as 36,000 miles or 50,000 km), we use round figures and say “about”. Map positions between named places are approximate.
Credits
- World map: Natural Earth land data via world-atlas and topojson-client, loaded from jsDelivr.
- Type: Fraunces, Inter and IBM Plex Mono from Google Fonts.
- All game writing, events, illustrations and code are original.
Privacy
No accounts, no tracking, no cookies. Your saved expedition, best times, quiz score, calculator settings and theme choice live only in your browser’s local storage.