After 28 years and four continents, Karl Bushby completes his walk home to Hull

Karl Bushby ended a 28-year walk on the pavement outside his mother's row house in Hull, northern England, the same home he left in 1998. He is 57 now. A banner reading "Welcome Home Son" hung over the street, and reporters, onlookers and a documentary crew crowded in as he threw his arms around his tearful mother, Angela.

He had come into the city on foot, as the rules of the journey demanded. On Sunday he crossed the Humber Bridge into East Yorkshire, where his father, his brothers and his 36-year-old son, Adam, were waiting. So was his 12-year-old granddaughter, whom he was meeting for the first time, according to the BBC. On Monday, around 11am, he reached Queen Victoria Square in central Hull, where hundreds had packed a civic ceremony. "I'm back," he told them. "This is absolute madness." He then joked, "Sorry to keep you waiting."

The walk began with a debate. In the mid-1990s his father, Keith, an Army veteran, passed along an argument among his special forces friends over whether a man could walk from London to New York by way of the Bering land bridge. Bushby had served 12 years with the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. He left the Army in late 1997, after a bad divorce and looking for a challenge. "I had something to prove to my paratrooper mates," he told Backpacker magazine. He set two rules: no vehicle would ever carry him forward, and he could not go home until his own feet took him there.

At 29 he flew from a Royal Air Force base outside Oxford to the southern tip of South America and began walking from Punta Arenas, Chile, on November 1, 1998, reportedly with less than $1,000. He expected the trip to take about five years. "We suspected that it was 12 years plus," he later said, "and the plus was a big plus. But never in our wildest dreams would we ever have imagined 28 years."

The road was punishing. In 2001 he got past armed conflict in the Darién Gap, the roadless jungle and mountain stretch linking the Americas, then spent 18 days in a Panamanian jail after wandering into a restricted border zone. In 2006 he and the American adventurer Dimitry Kieffer set out across the 90-kilometre frozen Bering Strait. They needed an air rescue, regrouped, faced a polar bear, nearly drowned in freezing water and almost lost their sleds and supplies to the sea. On reaching Russia they were arrested for illegal entry and threatened with deportation.

Bureaucracy proved a harder opponent than weather. Russia consumed nearly a decade, with visa trouble piling up and only a few months of each year suitable for walking. When Moscow refused him a visa in 2012, he walked from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington in protest, and he eventually got his documents. In 2013 the Kremlin banned him for five years, forcing a detour through Mongolia and China, a weeks-long swim across the Caspian Sea to Baku, and finally a push into Europe last year.

The last obstacle was the English Channel. The Channel Tunnel's operator rejected his request to walk its service passage, so Bushby, who has described his swimming as paddling "like a cat dropped in a bathtub," swam. On October 5 he came ashore at Shakespeare Beach, south of Dover, after roughly 20 hours in the water spread over three days. His father and brothers waited on the sand. He had cleared the crossing beforehand with French and British officials and both coast guards. "It hasn't been easy, and that's part of the point," he told The Post.

He named the Darién Gap and Alaska as the hardest stretches, and Colombia, Chile and the Atacama Desert as the most beautiful. He says he has no regrets: "It worked, so no, I wouldn't change a thing."

The harder work lies at home. Adam was 8 when his father left; he now lives in Belfast with a family of his own, and told the Yorkshire Post the return "doesn't seem real." Bushby said weeks earlier that there is distance between them that needs patching. Angela, who had not seen her son in a decade, kept scrapbooks of his journey at the Sutton Park house, where he is expected to move back in. "Karl has always been headstrong," she told the BBC. Bushby's own summary for the crowd was that strangers had fed and sheltered him for three decades: "Humanity is worth the effort."