Karl Bushby's 31,000-Mile Walk Home Was a Logistics Feat

Karl Bushby, a former paratrooper, arrived home this week after a 28-year walk around the world, and the details of his journey read like a logistics report written at the edge of failure. His 31,000-mile route began at the bottom of South America. It ran through the swampy jungle of the Darien Gap on the border between Colombia and Panama, where he disguised himself as floating debris while crocodiles and guerrilla fighters lurked nearby. He spent more than a month in Russian custody. Over 31 days he swam across the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan, a cumulative 132 hours in the water. Whatever else that is, it is delivery under the hardest conditions imaginable.

His homecoming lands as a pointed rebuttal to Paul Theroux, who told The Times this week that most travel writers are wimps. “They don’t take risks,” the author said. “I’m interested in someone whose yacht sank.” True, the adventurers of 2026 are unlikely to join royalist forces suppressing a republican uprising in Greece, as Patrick Leigh Fermor did in 1935, or to suffer dysentery and malaria while trekking across modern-day Iran, as Freya Stark did in the early 1930s. But the absence of those particular hardships does not mean the old days of swashbuckling exploration are over.

For the average person, flight and rail connections have made travel simpler and cheaper over the past half century. That shift in accessibility is precisely where the argument gets interesting, because ease of movement has not closed off the harder routes. There are great swathes of the world barely touched by tourism, in Africa, South America and even Europe. Cycling across Estonia from Tallinn to Lake Peipsi last year, this writer went hours at a time, every day for a week, without meeting another human, an emptiness broken only by a brown bear cub and what appeared to be a stray dachshund, miles from any settlement. Next on the itinerary is a group tour along the borderlands of eastern Turkey, taking in cities such as Gaziantep, Urfa, Mardin, Diyarbakir and Kars, along with the lakes, mountains and ancient ruins in between. The lack of tourists is exactly what appeals.

Meanwhile, boundary-pushers are not hard to find among today’s prominent explorers. Levison Wood’s documentaries pair old-school fearlessness with a thoroughly modern focus on conservation and environmental issues: he embedded with Iraqi troops fighting Isis in Arabia With Levison Wood, and in Walking with Elephants on Channel 4 he trailed elephants migrating across Botswana. The broadcaster Lyse Doucet, drawing on decades of reporting from warzones in Afghanistan, produced one of the greatest works of travel writing of recent years, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, published last year.

What changed is the infrastructure underneath the journey. Theroux was onto something when he added that he never travels with a computer; pen and paper are his companions. Devices constantly at hand do remove much of the spontaneity of travel, encouraging travellers to optimise every single minute of a holiday. Little makes the world feel small like keeping followers constantly updated online while the comments flood in.

The most high-profile adventure travellers of today live on social media, though calling them truly intrepid takes some hesitation. Ash Dykes, an influencer, made headlines last week after going missing for 16 hours during a made-for-Instagram expedition along rivers in the Congo Basin. Critics called it a publicity stunt, noting that a post from his London colleagues raising the alarm received 233,000 likes. Whether or not that is true, the operational detail is telling: he, his videographer and his guide were able to find a generator and recharge their devices in the remote wilderness of central Africa, proof of how far communications technology now reaches, and of how much the modern expedition depends on it.

The renowned explorers of the early 20th century went off-radar for months, even years at a time. Despite our connected world, today’s greats may well be out there somewhere too, beyond the reach of the network.