Officialdom halts Yorkshireman's 58,000km quest

Karl Bushby on the Bering Strait. Picture / Reuters

MOSCOW - Karl Bushby dreamed of walking 58,000 eye-opening kilometres from Chile to his home town of Hull on an epic journey traversing four continents, 25 countries, one frozen sea, six deserts and seven mountain ranges.

But that dream looks as if it has been defeated by an inflexible and maddening cultural phenomenon that has bedevilled travellers for decades: Russian bureaucracy.

Twenty-seven thousand kilometres and seven-and-a-half years into his journey of a lifetime, with another 30,000km and four years to go, an obscure Russian court above the Arctic Circle ruled that the former paratrooper was guilty of breaking border rules and should be deported.

A deflated Bushby is expected to be flown to Alaska within days with a stamp in his passport saying he will not be allowed to return to Russia for at least five years.

He has vowed to appeal but, barring a surprise, it seems that his extraordinary overland journey is at an end before he reached the halfway point.

The divorced father has struggled through Panamian swamps, weathered snowstorms in Alaska and evaded Colombian guerrillas but, prosaically, it looks like his failure to get a passport stamp will be his undoing.

The 37-year-old adventurer ran into trouble after crossing the Bering Strait, the 95km ice bridge which links Alaska to Russia. This month he made the perilous crossing with Dmitri Kieffer, an American citizen.

Both had Russian visas in their passports, but did not enter the country through an official point of entry and, as a result, did not carry the requisite stamps.

To compound Russian suspicions, Bushby was carrying a GPS device and a Magnum .44 pistol, apparently to protect himself from polar bears.

Nor had the men warned Russian officialdom in advance that they were coming across the Bering Strait, a feat accomplished by only an elite and hardy club of Arctic explorers.

Coming three months after an embarrassing Cold War-style spy scandal surrounding the British Embassy and a listening device disguised as a rock in Moscow, the Russian authorities were quick to take a dim view of Bushby's "incursion".

The fact that, in the times of the Soviet Union, the remote Arctic area was allegedly bristling with sensitive military hardware is likely to have further stoked suspicions.

The Cold War may have thawed but, to this day, visitors to the far eastern Chukotka province are required to get special permission from the local authorities, on top of a visa, to enter the area. It is not clear whether Bushby had such permission.

By a bizarre twist of fate, the governor of the province is none other than the billionaire owner of England's Chelsea Football Club, Roman Abramovich.

Indeed Bushby's father, Keith Bushby, had hoped that the rich and powerful Russian might be able to pull a few strings to allow his son to carry on his epic odyssey.

But, even though he would like to help, Abramovich feels he is powerless as the matter is strictly the preserve of the FSB security service.

"It's a federal matter," said a source close to the situation. "It's like asking [London Mayor] Ken Livingstone to change national laws in the United Kingdom. It's just not possible."

Keith Bushby says his son's morale is low and that though it hasn't sunk in, he knows he has suffered "one hell of a setback".

"He can't imagine that his expedition is finished ... because he couldn't get a stamp in his visa," he said.

Bushby set out from the southern tip of Chile in 1998, and has already walked the length of South and North America.

During this stage, he somehow found time to release a book called Giant Steps about his journey.

His plan was to trek across Asia and Europe, walking back through the Channel Tunnel to the United Kingdom and his home in Hull, East Yorkshire, in 2009.

- INDEPENDENT