21st Century Odyssey

By: Story by Beau Willimon | August 06, 2010 | Profile

If you traveled 1,600 miles south from Malibu down the Pacific Coast you would arrive in the small seaside town of Melaque, Mexico. In the age of modern travel, 1,600 miles doesn’t seem so far. By plane, you could cover the distance in just a few hours. By car, you could be there within days. But imagine walking to Melaque on foot. Getting there could take you half a year. And that’s at an average clip of 10 miles per day, which is being optimistic if you were hauling hundreds of pounds of gear over large expanses of rugged terrain, enduring brutal weather, evading armed rebels and thieves, recovering from illnesses, tending to injuries and dealing with heaps of bureaucratic red tape. Few people would ever dream of such an undertaking. But former British paratrooper Karl Bushby has walked more than 10 times that distance — 16,000 miles from the southern tip of South America to Alaska, across the Bering Strait and another thousand miles into Siberia. Remarkably, his journey is only halfway complete. He currently resides in Melaque while planning the second massive portion of his trek, the remaining 20,000 miles across Asia and Europe back to his hometown of Hull, England.

I first became aware of Bushby’s journey while perusing the travelogue shelf of a small bookstore in London several months ago. Giant Steps contains eight years of Bushby’s journal entries between 1998 and 2006. It’s a wild, improbable, page-turning ride, but the book leaves one major question unanswered: Why attempt such a journey in the first place? As soon as I read the final entry, I knew I had to track down him and find out.

Bushby was waiting for me at a restaurant when I arrived in Melaque’s sweltering town center last June. At 42, he still has a blond-haired, blue-eyed boyishness to his face, surprisingly unweathered by the years he’s spent outdoors battling the elements. He greeted me with a firm handshake and a hearty, “Welcome, mate!” In his book, Bushby says that early on in his travels, he was often mistaken for Kurt Cobain. When you look at pictures of Bushby from that time — with his long blond hair and blond stubbly chin — the resemblance is uncanny. Nowadays, Bushby’s long hair has given way to a buzz cut, but the likeness remains. I stayed in Melaque for three days, and Bushby talked me through every step of his journey.
On Nov. 1, 1998, Bushby, then 29 years old, set off from Puntas Arenas, Chile, with little money and few possessions. Everything he owned he pulled behind him in a makeshift, two-wheel trailer he called “The Beast.” His route took him through the desert highlands of Patagonia and then across the Andes toward the Pacific Coast. He walked the length of Chile until crossing the mountains once again into Peru. The climate grew hot and moist as he moved northward through Ecuador into the tropical jungles of Colombia. There he spent months planning for a crossing of the Darien Gap, the war-torn swath of no-man’s land on the border of Colombia and Panama. Eventually he made the crossing, evading armed rebels while fighting illness and starvation. Once he made it to Panama, he was thrown in jail as an illegal alien. Eventually Bushby was released and resumed his trip through Central America, the western portion of Mexico and across the U.S. border into Arizona. He stayed mostly east of the Rockies on his way toward Montana, where he crossed into Canada. By 2005 he had reached Alaska where his pace was greatly slowed by bone-chilling blizzards dipping to minus 40 degrees. In the winter of 2006, Bushby and a partner completed the only fully documented crossing of the Bering Strait on foot, diving into the sea in immersion suits when open channels of water separated icepacks. It took them 15 days to reach land again. After arriving in Siberia, Bushby was detained by Russian authorities who suspected him of being a spy. Once that was sorted out, he began the slow slog through the remote tundra, where he was plagued by visa and funding issues, not to mention some of the harshest terrain on Earth.

To understand the man who has spent the last dozen years walking the globe, you have to understand the 29 years that preceded the journey. Bushby was born and raised in Hull, England, a small town on the Humber Estuary in Yorkshire. His father was a career army man who totaled 24 years in the service, half of them spent in the SAS — British special forces. Bushby does not recall his school days fondly. He suffered from crippling dyslexia, which went undiagnosed until the year he left school for the army.

Before that, Bushby said, “It was a disaster. I was de-educated at school. Every Friday, there was a spelling test, and I couldn’t get one right. And I remember being made to stand on the desk as the teacher ripped into me in front of the class. And then of course once the teacher’s finished with you, then the kids will pick up where that left off on the playground. It was just an absolute living nightmare.”

His happiest moments were spent outdoors. “As a child, I was more of a naturalist than anything else. I was always out looking for furry animals and creatures. I was an incredibly keen birdwatcher. I had my own pet crow. The house was full of animals and cages with birds and rats and mice … and that’s still a part of me. Even as a paratrooper, when we were billeted and you have your bed space, the guys have pictures on the walls — it’s motorbikes and naked chicks and guns. And then in my bed space, it would be pictures of solar systems and DNA molecules and planets. And everyone was like, ‘What the fuck, dude?’”

Bushby left school at 15 and a year later joined the Boys Army, an extended training program for young men who have yet to turn 18. He joined largely due to encouragement from his father. “According to my mother,” says Bushby, “the day me and my brother were born, he dictated what regiments we were going to join. And it’s exactly what he got. One of us was going to be a paratrooper — that would be me. And one of us was going to join the Cold Stream Guards, which was family tradition — and that was my brother.” Generations of Bushbys have served in the army, and Karl was to be no exception. “As an early teenager, there was no doubt what I was going to do. And I never questioned it. Even if I never remember anyone telling me I was going to join the army, it just happened very, very naturally. By the time I was looking at leaving school, all I wanted to be was a paratrooper. And I didn’t want to be a paratrooper because they paid you; I wanted to be a paratrooper because I wanted to be a professional soldier. Period. It didn’t matter if I did it for free.”

Within days of joining, Bushby discovered he was in for a harrowing test of fortitude. “The first night, a guy tried to cut his own wrists to get out of the army. The second night, in the early hours, NCOs from the Scots Guard came in and kicked down to the doors to our billets. And they hammered us. It was like Abu Ghraib: Part One — they tortured us all. And we had no idea. We had just joined the army. We’re all thinking this is initiation.” Still woefully thin and short (he would eventually grow five inches within two years), Bushby struggled to keep up. “I remember my first report simply said, ‘This man has no fitness.’ And it was decided that I was never going to be a paratrooper. I was physically immature. I looked 12 at 16. I was as thin as a rake, and I just couldn’t keep the pace. But I persisted. The thing is with me — I would never quit. I would go out day after day after day and just take it. I would run myself into the hospital, and the next day I would go out and do it again. I would do that as many times as it took. That would be a lot easier to take than failure.”

On his fifth attempt, Bushby finally passed his training and ascended to the Paratroop Regiment. He was still considered the runt of the litter, however, and was generally looked down upon by his comrades. Despite his hardships in the regiment, Bushby claims he would have had no hesitation dying for it. “The same thing that happens in cults — that conditioning — is what’s happening in the army, especially within close-knit groups like elite units. Everything in life is about that unit. So you’re willing to lay down your life for the unit, even if the unit doesn’t respect you. It doesn’t matter. It’s all about the unit.”

Bushby’s first tour was in Belfast during the tail end of a decades-long conflict between British forces and the Irish Republican Army. “Northern Ireland was just security work,” said Bushby casually. “You know — patrols, just walking around being shot at and blown up.” In fact, his company lost five men while he was stationed there. It was in Belfast that Bushby met his future wife, Angela; she was a civilian working at one of the security bases on the heavily contested Falls Road. After she got pregnant, the two married. Bushby was 20, and she was 19. “She was the second girlfriend I had ever had at the time,” said Bushby. “I was so freakin’ inexperienced — it wasn’t going anywhere. So that lasted five years.” When the pair got divorced, Angela retained custody of their son, Adam.

Bookmarks: Page 1 of 4 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »