After 28 years and 51,000 kilometres walking around the world, Karl Bushby is back home

From the southern tip of Chile through dangerous forests, crocodile-infested waters and a brief stint in prison, Karl Bushby has been walking a 21st-century odyssey for 28 years.

You can barely see his straw-coloured hair and salty, greying beard as crowds throng around the man who read a birthday card from his father and decided to walk around the world.

After 10,229 days and 50,000 kilometres on the road, the 57-year-old shuffles past the Hull Theatres box office, where a gaudy poster for The Pantomime Adventures of Peter Pan stands out against the waving flags and giant “Welcome home Karl” signs put up by the council.

A cheer goes up as he’s handed a microphone and the bagpipes stop playing Auld Lang Syne.

“Twenty-eight years, and here we are, the last day, this last moment,” he says.

“It's been a week of lasts. The last day in the tent. Last day on the road alone. And after 28 years, you just couldn't ask for more than this.”

The former paratrooper was 29 when he entered the unknown at the tip of South America on November 1, 1998, and set out with $US500 ($713) and a cheap plastic camera on a journey across four continents, 30 countries and a mountain of red tape.

He hacked through jungle while dodging war in the notoriously dangerous Darién Gap, the roadless and rugged jungle between South and Central America.

A mob attacked him in Peru, there was a standoff with a polar bear in the Arctic, and in Colombia, he floated through crocodile-infested waters to avoid a guerrilla war.

The self-confessed poor swimmer donned a floatation vest and wetsuit to make it across the Caspian Sea and the English Channel, flapping his arms in a technique he calls "floatimming".

He was jailed for 18 days for crossing a restricted border zone in Panama and again for illegally entering Russia after a near-death plunge into freezing waters while crossing the Bering Strait with American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer. 

But red tape proved the biggest obstacle to what he’s dubbed his “Goliath expedition” and compared to The Odyssey.

"Odysseus was a bit of an amateur," Bushby quipped, noting he took nearly three times as long to get home as the titular hero. 

"But, you know, I'll cut him some slack — I haven't met any giant Cyclops."

It took almost 10 years to get through Russia because of visa issues and weather that only allowed travel a few months a year. A sidequest walking in protest from Los Angeles to the Russian embassy in Washington, DC, got the message across and he was eventually allowed the visa he needed to resume his journey. 

Bushby previously told the BBC he spent only 15 of the 28 years walking, returning to Mexico periodically to sort out visas, logistics and corporate and media sponsorship deals.

But two strict rules remained: he couldn’t use transport to move forward and he had to return on foot.

“They say it takes a village, but literally it took a world to get me here,” he says, back in Hull’s central square.

“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.”

That team welcomed him into shacks assembled from car parts, nursed him back to health from a bad stomach infection and fed him countless meals of just rice and water.

"I've been welcomed in by the poorest of the poor," he said while still on the trek.

“I’ve met 99.9999 per cent of the very best of humanity. Every culture, every country has been the same response.”

The whole thing started with a birthday card in the mid-90s when his father, also a veteran, mentioned an argument special forces troops once had about the possibility of walking from London to New York over the Bering land bridge.

Back then, Bushby’s blonde hair and blue eyes had some conspiracy theorists convinced Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was still alive and constructing an elaborate pseudonym.

Along the way he spent seven years with a Colombian woman, and three with a woman from Japan but both relationships fell apart.

His son from an earlier marriage mostly grew up without him and is now in his mid-30s.

His father met him on the beach in Dover when he crossed the channel, but Bushby hasn't seen his mother in a decade, which adds to the trepidation about his return.

His father met him on the beach in Dover when he crossed the channel, but Bushby hadn’t seen his mother in a decade.

They grasped each other tightly as the crowd of media and well-wishers almost filled her narrow, humble street. 

A few days earlier, about 50 kilometres from reunion, he was uncertain of the future, anxious about the prospect of living in her basement and facing an identity crisis.

"My purpose and reason for living is about to end," he said. 

"It's going to be difficult … trying to blend back into a society that you just don't know anymore."

A production company is backing a documentary about Bushby by filmmaker Werner Herzog – who was on hand to greet him – and has significantly supported Bushby for much of the past 16 years.

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham called Bushby an inspiration for generations to come.

In the crowded central square, Bushby tells the sea of people and phone “I guess I'll be seeing you around”.

But they probably shouldn’t count on seeing him pounding the pavement around north-east England city just for old times’ sake.

"I'm not doing it because I like walking," he said. 

"It's a means of getting somewhere."

- Reported with Reuters and Associated Press