Exclusive | I left my 8-year-old son behind 28 years ago to walk around the world. Now Im about to finish but will he forgive me?

Karl Bushby has conquered jungles, deserts, a frozen sea and the Kremlin’s visa office, all on foot.But his hardest journey may be when he walks back through his mom’s front door.The 57-year-old former British paratrooper is roughly 250 miles from finishing the Goliath Expedition, a 28-year odyssey that kicked off at the bottom of South America in 1998.When he left, he had an 8-year-old son at home.

That boy is now 36, a dad himself — and still waiting.Is Bushby ready to face his adult son nearly 30 years after starting his Odyssey?“Well, that’s gonna be a tough one,” Bushby told The Post when he called from London. “[I am] looking forward to reconnecting with everyone.There’s distance between us, and we need to patch that up, and move on.”His son Adam, who lives in Belfast, told the Yorkshire Post that his father’s homecoming “doesn’t seem real.”But it got a lot more real on Oct.

5.That afternoon, Bushby dragged himself out of the surf at Shakespeare Beach just south of Dover after logging about 20 hours in the water over three days.His father and brothers were waiting on the sand.

It was the first time he’d set foot in Britain since the Clinton administration.He kept the swim under wraps until he was safely ashore, clearing it in advance with French and British officials and both countries’ coast guards.Not bad for a guy who once admitted he swims “like a cat dropped in a bathtub.” Bushby had originally lobbied to hike through the Channel Tunnel’s service passage, but the operator shot him down, leaving him no choice but to get wet.“It feels good to have UK soil under my feet after all these years,” he told The Post in a separate statement.“It hasn’t been easy, and that’s part of the point.”Bushby spent 12 years in the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment before quitting the army at the end of 1997.

He was reeling from a bitter divorce and itching to prove himself.“I had something to prove to my paratrooper...