How did he get through it safely?
Perhaps he learned some skills in the military.
From the Wikipedia article:
He joined the British Army at the age of 16 and served with the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment for 11 years, serving in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner
If I wasn’t choking to death laughing, I would second this nomination! 
I think “walking around the world” means you end up where you started. He was just walking around (in) the world.
To be fair, dude covered about 290 degrees of terrestrial longitude out of a possible 360 (not to mention about 100 degrees of latitude). The longitude chunk he omitted was basically the width of the Atlantic Ocean, which isn’t really walkable.
I’m willing to call that essentially ”walking around the world, to the extent that the world can be walked around”.
(I keep checking back in this thread to see if the zeitgeist has yet thrown up any of the inevitable jokes about waiting for Karl Bushby to get back from the grocery store or something, but no luck so far. I do think he’s going to become something of a household word for this feat.)
(killjoy mode on)
I mean, it’s not like he never went home in that 28 year stretch; he did his walk in a bunch of smaller chunks (which made me raise an eyebrow when I saw the words “continuous” and “unbroken” in some of the articles).
(killjoy mode off)
He said it took 10 years to walk through Russia. I cannot even imagine the difficulty of doing all of it, but that especially hits hard.
I don’t believe he actually came back home to the UK at any point, though there were some pretty big breaks.
The ‘continuous’ I believe refers to returning to the same place the trip broke off when there were gaps, so there’s no gaps in distance, although there were in time.
Sure, but he could have gone there if he wanted to, considering he went back to Mexico several times.
Huh? Part of the challenge- in his words- was to go home only by walking, and that’s what he did. Your statement was:
..and that’s not the case.
It’s not like he had to do any of it, so I don’t understand why 'there was nothing stopping him from going home earlier ’ is relevant at all. There was nothing stopping him quitting either. He didn’t do either of those things.
Yeah, I guess I think the whole thing is kind of weird and arbitrary. I suppose Mexico was his base of operations but not what he considered his home?
He completely skipped Africa. (and Antarctica, I’ll forgive that!) Now, SD nitpickers, I’m not saying he had to walk every square foot, but Africa is a pretty big chunk of the world. Starting in Chile and ending in South Africa would be a lot closer to “around”.
IMO
Hmm. I just tried logging in at warmshowers, and found that my account had been deleted and they required a ‘donation’ to reregister. No wonder nobody’s contacted me for a couple of years!
Nah, I think of “going around the world”, strictly speaking, as meaning “returning to the same terrestrial longitude” or “completing a circumnavigation”. That is, your trip actually closed a loop on the globe (even more strictly speaking, after passing through at least one pair of antipodal points). The Atlantic Ocean, of course, prevents a pedestrian from closing any such loop.
So in my book, “walking around the world, to the extent that the world can be walked around” fundamentally just means getting from one side of the Atlantic to the other. No extra credit for a route traversing a larger amount of the earth’s landmass, if it isn’t increasing the total interval of terrestrial longitude you’ve covered.