The LongestJourney Home

Patagonia hit first — hurricane winds that bent him to a forty-five-degree lean and tore him and his cart off the road for days on end. Through the Atacama and the thin air of the high Andes came the hunger days, living on discarded food and roadside forage at thirty kilometres a day. Two years in, he reached Medellín, and the darkest obstacle on his map.

Before he ever left, Karl was stationed at Dover, and on clear days he would stand on the white cliffs and picture the weathered figure he might one day become, arriving on the European coast from the far side of the world. Closing that loop was the whole point of everything that followed.

Crossing war-torn Colombia in the late 1990s, he signed a professionally drafted will at his father's urging — yet passed through the country like smoke across a battlefield, untouched, sometimes missing active firefights by a single day.

He moved at night past FARC patrols, and where the swamp made walking impossible he disguised himself as floating debris, drifting downriver among the mangroves with the crocodiles until he could strike for high ground. Ten days in the trackless heart of the jungle brought him to the Panamanian side, living on what he could fish and forage. He re-emerged near a village in a green combat uniform, was met at gunpoint, and — having crossed a restricted border zone during an active war — spent eighteen days in a Panamanian jail before the walk could go on.

With his father back in the UK, Karl planned the Gap as a full escape-and-evasion exercise, with three contingency routes: a red route through towns for supplies, a hybrid blue route on back-paths, and a black route of total avoidance in disguise. On the ground he won the grudging favour of both the paramilitaries and the army to use the northern roads.

After a brief sanctuary with soldiers in besieged Riosucio, he pushed on through the jungle to Paya for a hot meal and rest. The whole ordeal — active war zones, paramilitaries, FARC, and a spell in prison — ended only when he finally walked through the doors of the British Embassy in Panama City.

He crossed the American southwest in fifty-degree heat, lost the cart to thieves in Montana and recovered it from a quarry, then ground through a brutal winter up the Trans-Canada and the infamous Alaska Highway at forty below. In 2004 he reached Fairbanks — the end of the paved road — where the route ran clean out of continent and he had to stop and wait for the rivers to freeze into a road north. That first winter he walked out into the Alaskan interior and came back forty pounds lighter, having survived still-air temperatures near minus fifty.

The long pause was only affordable because of a breakthrough at home: his father secured a book deal, and a Time Warner advance let Karl completely re-equip and train for a frozen world. While waiting out a summer he met French-American adventure racer Dimitri Kieffer, who knew the expedition well and was looking for a partner to take on the Bering Strait.

Even reaching the strait's starting line was punishing. Before Nome, Karl survived savage coastal blizzards and a midnight fall through the unstable sea ice of Norton Sound, and in one storm he and Dimitri were driven thirty kilometres out to sea on floating ice and had to be lifted off by helicopter.

Then the unpredictable Arctic turned: the current swung them back south, the wind dropped, and the temperature crashed from zero to near minus thirty-five, hardening the treacherous slush into solid ice. “It was like being Moses watching the Red Sea part,” Karl said. They marched west across the International Date Line into Russian waters, losing hard-won miles each night to the drifting ice, until one huge day of mileage put the anchored Russian coast within reach. To cross a fifty-eight-mile strait they had walked a tortuous fourteen-day, 150-mile zig-zag. But stepping ashore near the Chukotkan village of Uelen, they were detained on the spot by border troops for entering Russia outside an official port.

For nearly two months the expedition hung in the balance, facing deportation and a multi-year ban that would have killed it for good. On 5 May 2006 a Russian appeals court cleared him to continue. It emerged later that his release owed to quiet diplomacy far above his head — between Roman Abramovich, then governor of Chukotka, and John Prescott, the British deputy prime minister and MP for Karl's home city of Hull.

He forged from Uelen deep into the interior toward Bilibino and beyond, yet whole seasons moved the line forward by only a few weeks; miss the freeze and the country became an impassable matrix of roaring rivers and deep swamp, impossible on foot.

Then a different kind of storm hit. The 2007–2008 financial crisis wiped out his core sponsors, and with no money for permits or logistics the expedition simply stopped. Karl retreated to Mexico from 2008 to 2010, surviving on almost nothing while the walk hung in the balance. Finding backers mid-recession felt nearly as hard as the ice itself, but by 2010 sheer persistence won him a fresh wave of sponsorship, and in the spring of 2011 he stepped back onto the Siberian trail.

It was a year-long walk of pure protest, a rolling media campaign built to prove his determination and somehow move a political needle that would not otherwise shift. The audacious gamble paid off. By the time he reached the capital his relentlessness had captured global attention; the Russian government blinked, the ban was overturned, and he was handed a formal letter of invitation. In 2014 he finally walked out of the embassy with a brand-new visa in hand — the triumphant end of a detour of thousands of kilometres in entirely the wrong direction.

Just before the bitter winter of 2017 set in, the caravan officially set out and covered more than a thousand kilometres across the unforgiving steppe. But the strain told on the group as much as the animals: internal disagreements and rising tensions fractured the team, and the camel journey was abruptly dissolved. Karl left the caravan behind and crossed into China alone — the way he had always done the walking.

Eventually a lone officer fell in beside him without a word and walked him to a roadside tyre-repair shack, where plainclothes police arrived in three tactical groups, stripped and searched his gear, and confiscated all his footage. He was removed from the road and confined to a hotel under armed guard, then told flatly that the walk was over — they would drive him to the Kazakh border, which would have broken the continuous-walking rule and ended everything.

Handed his phone back for a moment, he fired off an emergency text to his team in Los Angeles and hit send just as they took it from his hands. The British Embassy intervened. They let him keep walking, but under a strictly mandated route, a twenty-four-hour escort, no camping and, later, no internet — right up to the Kazakh border.

Just as Iran reopened to him in the spring of 2020, the world stopped: the pandemic became one of the first crises to upend the region, and borders slammed shut across the globe. Turkmenistan never reopened; the northern reroute through Russia died with the invasion of Ukraine; Iran stayed impossible.

With every land route sealed, the only way forward was Plan C — an unprecedented straight-line swim across the open water. In late summer 2024, joined by fellow explorer Angela Maxwell, Azerbaijani national swim champions and a maritime support team flanked by escort vessels, he crossed 288 kilometres of the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan, battling waves, nausea and currents in six-to-nine-hour shifts. After thirty-one days at sea and over 132 hours in the water, the team stepped ashore in Azerbaijan to a hero's welcome, backed by the Azerbaijani government.

A week after arriving he secured rare, highly coveted permission to do what is normally strictly forbidden: cross the 15 July Martyrs Bridge, the old Bosphorus Bridge, entirely on foot. Walking high above the shipping lanes, he stepped off the bridge onto the European side of Istanbul — on his home continent for the first time in decades.

A little over three thousand kilometres now stand between him and the UK, and the final countdown has begun. At his relentless five-month pace he is roughly ten to twelve months from the finish, working around the strict limits of European Schengen visas as he pushes toward home — and one last stretch of water, the English Channel, still unresolved, still between him and his mother's door.