Karl Bushby walks into his mother's Hull garden after 28 years and 31 000 miles, set out from Chile in 1998 with a vow never to use motorised transport, rivers and deserts bent to him while visa offices nearly ended the walk

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An Englishman walked into his mother's front garden in Hull and asked for a cup of tea, 28 years and 31,000 miles after leaving it. Karl Bushby, 57, set off from the southern tip of Chile in 1998 with a vow to walk home without using any motorised transport, and on the final day of the expedition he wheeled his cart across Hull's North Bridge to a terraced house in the north of the city. His mother Angela greeted him with the question the whole journey had been answering: "Where have you been?"

The route ran through the Darien Gap, across the frozen Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, and — announced earlier this month — a swim across the Channel. Hundreds of well-wishers mobbed him in Queen Victoria Square, where the Lord Mayor noted the city had waited 10,229 days, and Hull East MP Karl Turner read a message of congratulations from the prime minister. Bushby, characteristically, declined the frame of lone heroism. "I didn't do this alone. It was a big team. The biggest team — Earth."

What the civic reception could not capture is how much of the 28 years was spent not walking. The Bering crossing was followed by a Russian entry ban that stranded the expedition for years, and border paperwork — visas, permissions, diplomatic letters — repeatedly threatened to end the journey in offices rather than wilderness. No state apparatus and no sponsor machine carried it; the project survived on the stubbornness of one man and whoever would put him up along the way. His son Adam, eight when the expedition began and 36 at the gate, waited in the front garden. Neighbours had strung "Welcome Home Karl" banners along the estate.

The desert, the ice, the jungle: all of it bent to a man on foot. The passport desks were the part that nearly stopped him. "Where have I been?" Bushby replied to his mother. "Twenty-eight years later. Here we are."