} On his own trip
Agreat way to start a conversation in Azerbaijan is by talking about the TV serial Ramayan (1987); it is still remembered there, for its opulent sets and costumes. In remote eastern Russia, an easy icebreaker is the Bappi Lahiri song Jimmy Jimmy Aaja Aaja from the 1982 film Disco Dancer.
In Mongolian, India is still Enetkheg (an ancient term for the land of the Indus). Make the connection by pulling up images of Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan or Amitabh Bachchan. “Bollywood is everywhere; it is the common thread that connects almost every country I travel to,” says Shubham Yadav, 21.
Yadav aka Nomad Shubham has been travelling the world since August 2018, hitchhiking (largely) across 40 countries on a budget that averages out to about ₹500 a day. From walking with nomads through part of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia to taking a dip in the icy waters of Siberian Russia in a -30-degree-celsius winter (a common Epiphany custom), it’s a wild ride that continues.
He’d always wanted to travel, Yadav says, but money was a constraint. Then, at 16, while enrolled in an IIT-JEE prep course at Kota, the boy from Munger, Bihar, came upon a TEDX talk by Croatian travel vlogger Tomislav Perko, explaining how hitchhiking changed his life. Yadav now knew what he wanted, and it wasn’t an engineering degree.
He started small, while enrolled in Kota, taking weekend trips around Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir, always spending as little as possible. This meant sleeping in temples and monasteries, pitching a tent wherever he could, and eating frugally. Six months of these weekends told him the hitchhiker life was indeed doable, and he decided to quit IIT prep altogether.
His parents, aghast at first, came to a compromise. They would pay his airfare to Russia, if he promised to try and find himself a university to study there. Yadav headed to Russia in 2018, travelled from there to Kazakhstan, and returned home with a confession: he wanted to be a travel vlogger.
His parents weren’t happy, but they saw that he was earning his own way now, as a tutor on an e-learning platform. The following year, Yadav set off on his first extended wander, determined to go as far as he could.
Over seven months, he made his way through Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and back via Myanmar. He began recording videos of his travels. In late2019, he returned home and, a few weeks later, headed out again, this time on a monthlong road trip to China via Bangladesh, Myanmar and Laos, hitchhiking all the way.
He had learnt to use Google Translate to communicate; to turn to women for help. In China, where hitchhikers are typically met with suspicion, local women helped convince truckers to take him onward.
He signed up on platforms such as Workaway and Worldpackers, which let him volunteer at hostels in exchange for shelter. He sometimes couch-surfed, cooking for his hosts in exchange for their hospitality (rajma-chawal and a quick chicken curry made with locally available spices turned out to be the most popular dishes).
He’s never been robbed, mugged or swindled, he says. “People always help. Locals I befriend readily lend or give away heavy fur jackets and boots when they see that I live on a very strict budget.”
In mid-2019, Yadav began posting his videos, and by March 2020 he had about 30,000 subscribers on Youtube. He hit the road again that year, this time making his way through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Azerbaijan, which is where he was when the pandemic border closures hit. He ended up staying in Azerbaijan for six months, but he was now earning enough from his vlogs to support an extended stay.
Today, his videos get millions of views. He’s earning enough to travel more comfortably, but he’s wedded to the idea of hitchhiking and living as frugally as possible on the road. “I end up saving, and that’s some comfort to my parents, though they would still prefer it if I had a regular job,” he says.
The one thing that has posed a challenge, he says, is unusual foods. Since his rule with food is to try anything once, he has eaten horse meat in Russia, tasted a snack made of bird bones in Tanzania. But he had to politely refuse 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. But the whole point is to learn about customs and cultures first-hand, “so I push myself to part take in at least a few, to truly experience a country”.
During his nine months in Africa last year, he mingled with the cattle-herding Mundari tribe in South Sudan, the body-painting Karo and Banna tribes and the lip-plate-wearing Mursi tribe in Ethiopia, visited Sudan, Uganda and Egypt. He is now on a 45-day trip through Europe (Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Sweden).
“Travel isn’t as easy as before, but since I have no plans or deadlines, I do things at my own pace,” he says.
What does he not look forward to while travelling?
“Having to explain saas-bahu serials”, which are popular across south-east Asia. “Or explaining the term ‘maanglik’ and why women marry trees.”