ARQUES: After 28 years and 50,000 km, a British adventurer is facing one last hurdle in his bid to trek home from South America without using any form of transport — the Channel.
“We thought we got permission to swim from the coast of France. Turned out that is not the case,” Karl Bushby, a former paratrooper, said as he walked towards Cap Blanc-Nez, within sight of the white cliffs of the English coast.
“There was some internal confusion. So, right now we’re scrambling in kind of semi-panicked state.” The 57-year-old had originally hoped to use a service corridor in the Channel Tunnel on foot, but he said the authorities seemed “set against” this idea.
So he resigned himself to swimming from Calais, even though he “hates” it. “I say I swim like a cat dropped in a bathtub. It’s not funny. It’s bad. But you just do what you’ve got to do,” he said.
At an earlier stage of the journey he took 30 days to cross the Caspian Sea with a mixture of swimming and floating, resting — but not advancing — on a boat. He hopes to get permission to swim across the Channel, before October 1, after which the winter weather would make the crossing too risky. When he set off in Nov 1998, Bushby set himself two rules: not to use any form of transport, and not to return home — near Hull in England — except on foot.—AFP