About
On 1 March 2026, Shubham Kumar posted a short message on Instagram: "Today, country number 197 is done. And my last country is Brazil." The hitchhiker from a village in Bihar was announcing that he had reached every sovereign state, closing a journey he counts as ten years long. Since 2019 he has filmed the road as Nomad Shubham, a YouTube channel of first-person Hindi vlogs about hitchhiking and overland border crossings. By October 2026 the channel had about 3.2 million subscribers.
From Kota's Coaching Classes to Jaisalmer
Shubham grew up in Makwa, a village in Bihar's Munger district. According to ETV Bharat, he is the eldest of three children of Satish Kumar Satya, a retired school principal, and Gauri Devi, a homemaker. MetaStory reported that he moved to Patna for Class 12 and then to Kota to prepare for the IIT entrance exams, studying about ten hours a day. A VICE profile places him there in 2017, a 16-year-old among the thousands in the city's coaching classes.
Several outlets credit a TEDx talk with changing his course: "How to Travel the World with Almost No Money," by the Croatian traveller Tomislav Perko, which he reportedly watched more than ten times. "If this guy can do it, why can't I?" was his reaction, according to MetaStory. Indian outlets say he had his coaching fees refunded and spent the money on travel. ETV Bharat says he told his family he was preparing for the civil services exam before he flew to Malaysia.
His first hitchhike, in 2017, took him more than 673 km from Kota to Jaisalmer. "I had never felt such a rush in my life before," he told VICE. "After my first trip, I knew I couldn't stop."
Five Hundred Rupees a Day
At first he stayed inside India, travelling through Rajasthan and up into the Himalayas. ETV Bharat calls a 2018 trip to Ladakh the turning point that set him on the goal of visiting every country. Abroad, he hitchhiked nearly 3,000 km across Russia and made early trips to China, Thailand, Laos and Central Asia.
He hitchhiked, rode local buses and trains, and crossed borders overland. He found beds through Couchsurfing or volunteered in return for room and board, on a daily budget usually put at about ₹500, or US$6. In 2021 he told VICE that he paid his way by tutoring online and through YouTube.
A Channel Named in Mongolia
He created the channel on 5 July 2019. "I started my YouTube channel in Mongolia in 2019, right after I met a tribe of nomads in a desert," he told VICE. The Reelstars describes his style as handheld and shot on the spot, in Hindi and regional languages, with people ahead of sights. AajTak noted that he explains budget travel and visas in plain Hindi for viewers in small towns and villages.
In January 2020 he reached Oymyakon in Siberia, often called the coldest inhabited place on Earth, where VICE says he nearly got frostbite at about minus 60 °C. He also hitchhiked across Siberia and along the Pamir Highway in temperatures as low as minus 43 °C. By November 2021 the channel had about 1.7 million subscribers, he counted more than 55,000 km of hitchhiking, and VICE was calling him the "King of Hitchhiking."
Detentions, Kabul and a Viral Clip
VICE reported that Chinese police had detained him at about ten police stations and that the Afghan army held him for eight hours on suspicion of spying. In 2021 he and the American traveller and YouTuber Brayden Drevlow were living in Kabul in the days before the Taliban takeover, and afterwards the Hindi outlet News Tak carried his account of conditions in Afghanistan.
In 2024 a short clip from one of his Israel videos spread on X with the claim that Israeli bars turned Indians away. On 18 April 2024 the fact-checkers at DFRAC rated that claim "Misleading": in the full video the bars were simply full, and another bar welcomed him. Israel's embassy in India also rejected the claim.
Six Passports to Brazil
By VICE's tally he had visited more than 40 countries by late 2021, and MetaStory put the count at over 58 by December 2023. Africa took him to Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania and into the jungles of the Central African Republic. Police in Gabon questioned him as a suspected spy, and he was stranded during protests in Mozambique. He reportedly filled six Indian passports and was nearly refused entry to Ecuador because no blank pages were left.
In 2026 the channel fell silent for three months. After a Fiji episode in late April, nothing appeared until 1 August, when he posted a video titled "Why I Left YOUTUBE ?" In the Oceania episodes that followed, he says his camera was stolen in Auckland and that "for a while I completely lost the motivation to continue making videos." In one titled "I gave up in Australia," he describes being exhausted and homesick in Brisbane. He kept going, and the series runs on to Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste.
Ecuador became country 195, and Paraguay, number 196, required a visa he calls "extremely difficult" to get on an Indian passport. For the last border he chose to hitchhike "instead of taking a bus, booking a flight," from Asunción to the Brazilian frontier near Iguazu Falls, then went on to the falls and to Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. "From my first hitchhike to my last one. 10 years. 197 countries," he wrote in March. Indian outlets gave his age as 24, and he presents himself as the youngest Indian and the youngest Asian to visit all 197 countries. The episodes of that final crossing reached YouTube in October 2026, seven months after his announcement.
After Country 197
In July 2026 ETV Bharat visited his family in Munger and found him at home. His father said Shubham "always thought differently" and "never gave up on his dreams." His mother said she had worried about his safety but trusted him. Saahas Samachar reports that he has collected banknotes and coins from all 197 countries, and TCO News and Awadh 360 say former President Ram Nath Kovind phoned to congratulate him.
SigmaStory reported in January 2026 that he had co-founded VisaFu, a visa-assistance service, with Deepanshu Sangwan of the travel channel Nomadic Indian. Patna Press says he wants to focus on deeper storytelling and on helping others travel the world in practical ways. On 8 October 2026 he announced a new venture: a Northern Lights group tour in Russia, the country where he once hitchhiked nearly 3,000 km.