Bald and Bankrupt: The Brit Who Walks Where the Tour Bus Won't Go

Who Is Bald and Bankrupt?

Bald and Bankrupt is Benjamin Rich, an English travel YouTuber born in Brighton in 1974. Since 2018 he has wandered into towns no guidebook bothers with, mostly across the old Soviet Union, with one small action camera and no plan at all. He has also filmed in India, Cuba and a long list of places in Latin America, which is how he ended up on a Spanish site.

The name tells you most of what you need to know. He has no hair, and at one point he had no money. Most YouTubers spend weeks choosing a channel name. Ben read out his medical chart and his bank statement and called it a day.

I like him because his Cuba videos are some of the most human travel footage ever shot in the Spanish speaking world, and because he proves you don't need fluent Spanish to have a real conversation. You need nerve, a few phrases and a high tolerance for embarrassment. I have two of those three.

Why Is He Called Bald and Bankrupt?

Because he was both. His business went under and he was declared bankrupt, and the hair had left long before the money did. He has said he picked the name to own both problems before anybody else could use them against him. It's the oldest rule in comedy: roast yourself before the hecklers do. Nobody has ever insulted Bald and Bankrupt with anything he hadn't already put in his own name.

How Did Bald and Bankrupt Start?

With the Berlin Wall. Ben was about 15 when it came down and a whole hidden world cracked open on the evening news. Most teenagers in 1989 had posters of pop stars on their wall. Ben, as far as I can tell, had the Warsaw Pact.

He later married a woman from Belarus, now his ex-wife, and in 2018 he published a book about traveling through the parts of Belarus that caught the fallout from Chernobyl, under the pen name Arthur Chichester. It might be the least beach-holiday book ever written.

The channel launched on June 12, 2018, and the first videos came from India: policewomen, and a bridge billed as the most haunted in the country. Later that year he went back to India with his friend Harald Baldr, a Norwegian YouTuber who had the bigger channel at the time and who will tell you he's Norwegian about four times per video. What he won't tell you is what he wrote on his blog before YouTube.

Then he pointed the camera at the former USSR: crumbling Soviet towns, babushkas, the empty country around Chernobyl. That's when it took off. His most watched video is still a trip to Moldova from April 2019. Moldova. Millions of people watched a bald man walk around a country most of them couldn't find on a map with both hands and a torch.

How Does Bald and Bankrupt Make His Videos?

With no map and no script. Over and over he tells the camera he has no idea where he is. He walks, he talks to whoever is standing nearby, and he steers around anything that looks like a tourist attraction. He films on one small action camera. Other YouTubers travel with a drone, a gimbal and a guy called Jake who does the colour grading. Ben travels with a camera the size of a matchbox and the confidence of a man who has already been bankrupt once.

He says his channel is about the people he meets, not about him. That sounds like a line from a press release, but it holds up. The best moments nearly always belong to somebody else.

His Russian is the secret weapon. It's good enough to sit down in a village outside Minsk and have a real conversation with the people who live there, and that's the difference between visiting a place and being let in. An Englishman learning Russian for fun is like a man taking up knife juggling because he saw it once on telly. It's impressive, and nobody understands why.

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Does Bald and Bankrupt Speak Spanish?

A little, and it's getting better. In Cuba in 2020 his Spanish was phrase level at best, the “una hamburguesa, por favor” kind. It was like a tourist's umbrella in a hurricane: technically there, mostly useless. He leaned on his Belarusian partner Alina to translate, named her Comandante Alinchik, and admitted on camera that it's difficult when you don't speak Spanish. That's like a man falling off a roof and admitting gravity is quite strong.

Then, in Caracas in April 2023, he told the camera he had started studying Spanish a year earlier for one main reason: so he could visit Venezuela. By the end of the trip he admitted his Spanish still wasn't good enough. He was 48. That's a man deciding to learn a whole new language because there's a country he wants to talk to. If that doesn't make you open your Spanish app tonight, nothing will. In 2026 he went back to Venezuela and landed to find his card didn't work there thanks to sanctions, with 30 dollars in his wallet, which is the most Bald and Bankrupt sentence ever written.

What Happened in Bald and Bankrupt's Cuba Series?

In early 2020 Ben and Alina crossed Cuba the hard way, from small towns to Santa Clara, then through Camagüey and Las Tunas all the way to Santiago de Cuba. The five part series that came out of it is the best thing he has made, and I'd put it up against anything ever filmed on the island.

It starts terribly. He sprains his ankle on day one. The Wi-Fi only works if you stand outside the state telecom office. A bus driver refuses to let them on for Santa Clara, a stranger walks up and throws his beer away for no reason, and one night they end up in what Ben is fairly sure is a brothel, with mirrors on every wall. He eats spaghetti drowned in ketchup in a peso café and drinks from a glass somebody cut out of an old bottle. It's a Lonely Planet guide written by Murphy's Law.

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But the series is about people, not hardship. He meets a man who starred in around 50 films in the sixties and seventies and now works construction for about 80 dollars a month. He meets a father going from town to town, looking for cancer medicine for his son. And a few minutes later a tiny kitten nearly gets run over, so he and Alina scoop it up and name it Fidel.

That kitten becomes the heart of the whole thing. Italian vets from Milan they bump into show them how to feed it with a syringe. At one bus station Ben tried to pay a stranger ten dollars to take the cat. By the end he smuggled Fidel out of the country himself, straight through the X-ray at Varadero airport, with a stop in Cancún before landing in Brussels. A kitten named after a dictator escaped Cuba through airport security. The real Fidel would have hated every part of that.

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By the time they reached Santiago, Ben summed up what nearly everyone had told them: the revolutionary dream was over, and everyone they spoke to wanted to leave.

Cuba wasn't a one off. He walked El Alto in Bolivia in 2019, Tepito in Mexico City and the roads of Sinaloa in 2020, and what he called Bogotá's dirtiest street in 2023. Later that year he crossed the Darién Gap with the Greek YouTuber Timmy Karter and rode La Bestia, the migrant freight train, up through Mexico. Most men his age take up golf. Ben took up the Darién Gap.

Why Is Bald and Bankrupt Banned From Russia?

Because in 2022 a Russian court found him guilty over a video about the war, fined him 50,000 rubles and banned him from the country for three years. By his own telling he spent the night before in a basement cell with a lightbulb that never went off. It capped off a rough year. That February he was in Kyiv when the Russian invasion began and left on a refugee train. That May he got arrested at a space centre. Most people's bad year is a breakup and a parking ticket. Ben's involved a cosmodrome and a Russian cell.

The space centre one is the best story he has ever told. Baikonur is the cosmodrome Russia rents in the middle of the Kazakh desert, and in one of its hangars sits the Buran, the Soviet space shuttle, abandoned and gathering dust. Ben and Alina walked through the desert all night to see it, ten or twelve hours of falling into animal burrows, reached the hangar at dawn before the guards in the watchtowers could spot them, and climbed in through a second floor window on a piece of scrap metal. When they climbed back out, a police car was waiting. On the walk over to it, Ben slipped the SIM card with the footage out of his camera and hid it in his cheek. It stayed there for the next twelve hours, all through the police interview, and he spent the whole time scared it would shoot out, because he spits a bit when he talks. The police mostly wanted to know how they had dodged the scorpions. They were fined about 60 pounds, and the next morning their passport pages were all over the British news. Most people bring home a fridge magnet. Ben brought home a space program's worth of footage in his mouth, like a hamster that works for MI6.

Wandering around without a plan has a price, and he has paid it more than once. Back in 2019 he was made to apologize on camera in Chechnya over comments about Chechen women. That's the risk of having no script. Sometimes you say the part a script would have cut.

Then there's India. In September 2024 he posted a video called “I Visited India So You Don't Have To”, stood in Varanasi and called India “pretty much a failed state”, then added that the people are very friendly and very nice. The backlash was enormous. The title now ends with “(And offended 1 billion people)”. That isn't an apology. That's a man updating the scoreboard.

Is Bald and Bankrupt a Poverty Tourist?

I don't think so, though I see why people say it. The criticism is that he points a camera at struggling places for views. Watch the Cuba series, though, and the poverty is there, but so are the jokes, the ketchup spaghetti, the kitten and the father looking for medicine, all filmed with patience instead of pity. A poverty tourist films people from across the street. Ben sits down at their table.

The internet also carries a long list of darker accusations about him, mostly from anonymous forums and YouTube exposés. I couldn't find a single one confirmed by a reputable outlet, so I'm not repeating them here.

Where Is Bald and Bankrupt Now?

Still walking. In April 2026 he reached Turkmenistan, the last of the 15 former Soviet republics on his list. Fifteen countries, one tiny camera, zero hair. He finished the set like a kid with a sticker album, if every sticker came with a visa interview.

Then he ranked all fifteen, and Turkmenistan came dead last. His main complaint was being marched around by a guide to one pointless Guinness World Record after another, which is like a museum tour where every room is the world's largest carpet. Georgia, which most of his viewers would put near the top, came tenth, and he knew it would be controversial. Number one was Belarus, because that's where it all started: the country he wrote about as Arthur Chichester, the first place he ever said the word “Soviet” on camera, in Babruysk, and the home of Kolya, the old man living alone deep in the forest who his viewers took to more than anyone else on the channel. He toasts it with his favourite local vodka, which is called Wild Duck. Of course it is.

I don't agree with everything he says. But I keep coming back to Cuba, and to that moment in Caracas where a 48 year old admits his Spanish isn't good enough yet and keeps going anyway. That's the whole point of learning a language. You start badly, you embarrass yourself in a café, and one day the people across the table start talking back.

If you liked this one, my piece on Kurt Caz is the other side of the same coin, a traveler who went all in on Spanish. And if the language side is what pulled you in, my Duolingo review is a good next stop.