YHK - yet another hacker news clone

After 28 years walking across the globe, he's almost home

58 points rafaelc 3 hours ago 29 comments

https://archive.ph/NCeML

fhdkweig 1 hour ago | parent

To sum it up in one word: visas.

Turns out walking thousands of miles is the easy part.

for another source,

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/exhibition-charts-karl-...

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby

ShinyLeftPad 1 hour ago | parent

It's a bit mysterious how did he get from Russia to Mexico in 2006? The official website linked says just "displaced".

looperhacks 1 hour ago | parent

Is it? He took a plane, surely

ShinyLeftPad 55 minutes ago | parent

That's what I thought but then the article says it's supposed to be "with unbroken footsteps". I thought that literally was impossible in modern society and i guess it is

atrus 3 minutes ago | parent

People always assume he's been walking continuously for all these years, and it's understandable because the headlines are always written to imply that.

He doesn't. He walks some, marks where he stopped, takes a break, continues from where he left off.

TFNA 1 hour ago | parent

Bushby's walk has been extensively covered in the press (and in his own book about the Americas leg). Mexico served as his base while waiting for visas, permissions, and sponsorship, so he was flying back there and then, once he could continue, he flew back to the exact coordinates he had left off and started walking again from there.

ShinyLeftPad 53 minutes ago | parent

I haven't heard of it until this fall.

TFNA 47 minutes ago | parent

I found a copy of Giant Steps in a European bookshop circa 2008, so he was never an obscure figure. In any event, within the overland travel community especially, Bushby comes up occasionally for his walking across the Darien Gap (a region which is the bane of people traveling up or down the Americas), as well as for his Bering Strait crossing.

GrumpyGoblin 23 minutes ago | parent

Had a developer who worked for me who did something very similar. Lived all over the world, would get short term visas, and return to Mexico if needed to await his next visa. He had a friend that let him use his mailing address for work and mail and slept on his couch or in hostels while awaiting a new visa. He loved the life. Lived on a dozen different beaches while he was working for me. Apparently a Mexican visa is one of the easiest to get.

testing22321 39 minutes ago | parent

I’ve driven my personal vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents. It’s not that hard.

reconnecting 1 hour ago | parent

Arthur Blessitt

38 years, 5 months, 20 days

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Blessitt

bsammon 52 minutes ago | parent

To clarify, Arthur Blessitt is not the subject of the NYT article.

Karl Bushby is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby

dingdongditchme 1 hour ago | parent

Reminds me of a couple German who walked/hitchhiked across the globe and made a movie of while doing so: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weit._Die_Geschichte_von_einem...

They get a baby in the middle of it but keep going (maybe changing the rules a little ^.^). Still inspiring and heart-warming.

tarentel 1 hour ago | parent

This guy had a baby not too long before this and just left it behind. We should really stop talking this guy, he's not a great person as far as I'm concerned.

TFNA 58 minutes ago | parent

There has been plenty of press coverage of how Bushby was unable to see the child, because the mother took the child to Northern Ireland where Bushby was unable to follow due to his military status.

tarentel 39 minutes ago | parent

lol, yes it is the mother's fault he decided to abandon his child.

TFNA 32 minutes ago | parent

Do you know anything about the Troubles and post-Troubles era? In any event, there has just been so much press coverage of this very topic (and in recent years of a largely conciliatory tone) that your original post is not any kind of gotcha to Bushby, but rather just the usual social-media peanut gallery.

clickety_clack 24 minutes ago | parent

If the mother took the child to a place that he couldn’t go, then yes.

dlisboa 5 minutes ago | parent

Couldn’t go to Northern Ireland but could go walk around the world. Yeah, right.

There’s nothing that would make me not see my son short of imprisonment. If he wanted to be around his kid he would be.

jph00 1 hour ago | parent

Gift article (requires login, but no subscription):

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/world/europe/karl-bushby-...

hbn 52 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how his now 36-year-old son who was 8 when his father left to do this for no reason feels about it.

Does doing a lot of walking make it acceptable to leave your young kid and go globetrotting for 30 years?

TFNA 43 minutes ago | parent

Why not ask his son, who has joined him on sections of his walk, or at least read the abundant press coverage about the two and why Bushby was unable to follow his infant son to Northern Ireland?

smt88 19 minutes ago | parent

“Temporarily unable to go to Northern Ireland” doesn’t justify abandoning your child for the entire rest of his life.

There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.

TFNA 13 minutes ago | parent

In so many of these stories, once the parent and child have publicly reconciled as Bushby and his son have, the child is very annoyed by total strangers on social media continuing to harp on abandonment or injustice; it feels like an intrusion into their personal life that hbn or smt88 knows nothing about. So, you might want to ask whether your intervention here is actually sought.

adaml_623 2 minutes ago | parent

Well maybe public judgement of a father abandoning their child will stop it from happening to a child in the future.

IncreasePosts 11 minutes ago | parent

He couldn't go to Belfast because he was active duty in the British military.

But, he left the army to do his around the world walk, which means that he could have left the army and gone to Belfast instead.

He and his adult son have a good relationship now seemingly, but that doesn't mean his son didn't need a dad growing up. Having said that, it seems like this dude had a whole slew of mental issues, so perhaps it was for the best that he wasn't around his son much while he was growing up.

dudul 14 minutes ago | parent

I think I read (maybe on a wikipedia article about this project) that he was already pretty much an absent father before even starting this walk.

sosodev 3 minutes ago | parent

Acceptable? No, but some people realize too late that they want an alternative mode of existence. As somebody who had abusive parents, I would rather they had pursued their desires.

fallinditch 16 minutes ago | parent

See also [1] - Simon Hattenstone's interview with Karl Bushby

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/oct/13/karl-bu...