What this quote means

The sentence turns on a single word: looks. Bushby is not claiming the world is safe, or kind, or fair. He is making a narrower and more defensible point — that the picture most of us carry around in our heads is assembled from headlines, and headlines are selected for danger, conflict and exception, because that is what holds attention. The map is not the territory, and the news is not the world. He would know. He has spent the better part of three decades moving through that world at walking pace, and the thing that kept him alive was not the machinery of the state or the reach of an insurance policy. It was strangers.

That is what gives the line its authority, and it is why the qualification in front of it matters so much. Bushby is careful, in the same interview, to say he is “not totally naive”: “I know humanity can be an absolute pain in the arse, especially when we’re in groups.” He has been held at gunpoint by paramilitaries in Colombia, jailed in Panama for entering without a visa, detained by Russian border guards, and buried by snow in Alaska. He is not a man who has been insulated from the worst of us. His claim is precisely graduated: crowds can be awful, and individuals are almost always better than the crowd. The 24-hour news cycle can only really report on the first; the second rarely makes a headline, because kindness is not an event.

So the quote is not optimism as a mood. It is a correction to evidence. Bushby kept a running experiment going for 28 years, and the result, he says, was “a constant display of the very best of humanity.” People fed him, gave him shelter, nursed him back to health, and waved him on when they shared not one word of language. In one of the book’s most disarming scenes, two gunmen in a Colombian village read his waterlogged newspaper clippings, decided he was genuine, and bought him a new coat. That is the data behind the sentence. His verdict is empirical, not sentimental: having spent a lifetime sampling human beings one at a time, his money is on us.

There is a final, harder layer, and it is the reason the quote travels beyond travel writing. Most of us form our view of other people from a feed — a stream of the worst things happening anywhere in the world, delivered instantly and endlessly. Bushby’s counter-argument is not that we should stop reading the news. It is that a report is not a relationship, and that the only honest way to find out what people are like is to go and meet some. “The three mile an hour perspective of the world is really the way to go,” he says. “You’ve got to get burned by its sun, stung by its insects, pricked by its thorns, chew on its dirt.” The world looks better than the news, in other words, because it is. You just have to go and look.

About Karl Bushby

Karl Bushby was born on 30 March 1969 in Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and grew up in the city’s Sutton Park area. He was severely dyslexic, diagnosed at 13, and bullied at school for it — an experience he has described as “hell.” He found his escape outdoors, birdwatching near his home, and he joined the British Army at 16, serving with the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment for roughly a decade and taking five attempts to pass his basic training. It was while he was a soldier, bored and waiting for a deployment that never came, that he drew a single line across a map — from the UK, down through Europe and Asia, across the Americas to the bottom of South America — and decided that was the route home.

He left his mother’s house in Hull on 5 October 1998, and began the walk itself on 1 November 1998 from Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile, with a few hundred dollars and paper maps. He called it the Goliath Expedition, and he gave it two rules he would not break: no form of motorised transport could carry him forward, and he would not set foot in the UK again until he could arrive on foot. He crossed the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, the jungle corridor that connects the two continents and that many travellers do not survive, slipping past FARC guerrillas before being jailed for 18 days in Panama for entering without a visa. He reached the United States in 2002 and walked the length of North America.

The two crossings he is best known for came later. Between 17 and 31 March 2006, he and the French adventurer Dimitri Kieffer crossed the frozen Bering Strait on foot from Alaska to Siberia — the first recorded east-to-west crossing on foot — only to be detained by Russian border troops for arriving at the wrong place. In August 2024, rerouted by geopolitics, he swam the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan, roughly 288 kilometres over 31 days, becoming the first person to swim it. In between came the long years of being stuck: the 2008 financial crisis cost him his sponsors; Russia refused him a visa in 2012 and then banned him for five years; he responded by walking more than 3,000 miles in the “wrong direction,” from Los Angeles to the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., a protest that eventually helped get the ban overturned in 2014. He crossed into Mongolia in 2017 and China in 2018, then through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, before the pandemic and a border of closed doors stalled him in Central Asia.

He resumed in Europe, crossed the Bosphorus in Istanbul in 2025, and walked on through the Balkans and Western Europe. On 5 October 2026, after swimming the English Channel from France, he stepped onto Shakespeare Beach near Dover — welcomed, among others, by his father and by the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who has been assembling hundreds of hours of footage into a documentary about the walk. By 7 October his English Wikipedia page had drawn 76,279 views in a day, against a couple of thousand a day in early September. He is expected to reach his mother’s house in Hull in November 2026, bringing a journey of roughly 50,000 kilometres across 29 countries to an end 28 years after it began. He is also the author of a 2005 memoir, Giant Steps, and he already knows what he will say when he finally arrives: “Told you I could do it. Now, what’s for tea?”

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