Photos: Take a tour around the world with 21-year-old hitchhiker, Nomad Shubham

Shubham Yadav aka Nomad Shubham has been travelling the world since August 2018, hitchhiking across 40 countries on a budget that averages out to about ₹500 a day. As a YouTuber, he has over two million subscribers who tune in to watch his travel vlogs. ...read more

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The boy from Munger in Bihar, who dropped out of an IIT-JEE prep course at Kota, headed to Russia in August 2018, after convincing his parents that he was going to find himself a university to study at there. In Moscow, he visited the Red Square (above) and the largest ISKON temple, camped overnight by the Barents Sea and tried horse meat for the first time. From there he travelled to Kazakhstan and returned home with a confession: he wanted to be a travel vlogger.

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In March 2021, he visited a very different Ukraine from the pictures of war-torn devastation we see today. Above is an image from Pripyat, which was evacuated after the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 and has been a ghost town since.

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Yadav with members of the lip-plate-wearing Mursi tribe in Ethiopia. He travelled across Africa for nine months last year. The lip plates are worn as a symbol of beauty and resilience. 

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In January 2020, Yadav visited Oymyakon, a remote Russian settlement that is one of the coldest inhabited places in the world. Temperatures here can drop as low as -71 degrees Celsius. “I remember being dropped off by a trucker at 2am. I had no idea where I would stay for the night. I was cold and confused, my limbs had gone numb and my eyelashes were frozen. I started calling out for help till one kind stranger let me in for the night,” Yadav says.

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Mingling with the cattle-herding Mundari tribe in South Sudan, Yadav learnt the secret to their orange-brown hair: cow-urine baths. The urine acts as a bleach. “They Mundari are very protective of their cattle and depend on them for everything,” Yadav says. The whole point of being a traveller is to learn about customs and cultures first-hand, he adds, so he spends as much time he can with locals, trying regional delicacies and listening to stories of their way of life.

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The one thing that has posed a challenge, he says, is unusual foods. He has eaten horse meat in Russia, tasted a snack made of bird bones in Tanzania, but politely refused par-boiled buffalo meat in South Sudan. “It was boiled with the skin and hair and I could not bring myself to try it,” he says. His favourite meal so far was the vegetarian Ethiopian fare (a platter is picture above). It typically involves injera, a sourdough flatbread, and a range of vegetables such as cabbage, carrots, potatoes and lentils.