Nepal Uncovered: Travel Podcast Launches

Nepal Uncovered: Travel Podcast – brings you the best discussions about traveling to Nepal

It started as some fun and also a learning experience. I really wanted to do something a bit different with this project. If I were to host a Nepal Podcast alone, it would either be information overload, and I’d probably start ranting too much about the shenanigans that go on in Nepal with the so-called industries and organizations there. Interesting for industry insiders, sure. But for travelers thinking or planning on going to Nepal for the first time, it wouldn’t really work. Instead, I took a completely different approach than any other podcast.

Two podcasters and an author. That’s the so-called tagline. Two podcasters will use my work to discuss and analyze the topic themselves and share it with listeners. I’d produce the content. We’d have someone produce the actual show. And we’d create some nice illustrations for the Nepal Travel Podcast to make it more fun. So we have Ryan Last, Sarah Kumar, Ashia Hart, Sarah Muni, and myself.  Pocket Casts and some great podcasters there were one of the driving forces for pushing this forward as a unique idea to help travelers on their way to Nepal. Likewise, Anita from Spotify who helped technically.

The results … wow. Podcasting has become a lot harder than it was before! There was a podcast here back in 2008! Made for those who were hard of sight. Today software can read aloud what’s on a website. Meanwhile, over the past few years, Podcasting, in it’s own right, seems to have have taken off. And, become far more complicated to set up compared to before! I thought we’d be done in a couple of weeks. Two months later, and there were still “issues”. But we made it. And here it is.

What will be in the Nepal Uncovered Podcast, and why should I listen?

Why should you listen? Because the quality of content is top-notch, and it has the unique format of two podcasters discussing a single topic every week. It’s not some long-winded Nepal Podcast about someone’s trip to Nepal or why they think you should go and how great it was. Each episode will be an in-depth, fun discussion about a topic. We’ll be covering the basics and also going really deep into subjects that some people in the industry don’t want to talk about, but tourists going there really should be aware about.

I listen, on a regular basis, to one long-term podcast. And, I’ve about 4 more in reserve. None, of them are about travel. One is by a stand-up comedian who puts the terrors into the politically correct types out there, and the others about some non travel interests I have. The one thing they all share is, they do a great job at putting me to sleep. I don’t mean that in a negative way, most have me in a happy mood. But, as most are three hours long, I tend to drift off. I wanted to avoid this with Nepal Uncovered. I wanted short, fun, informative episodes that would help people on a specific topic about Nepal. Something they can listen to on a quick commute, before bed (without drifting off), making a meal, or simply whenever they wanted to learn a bit more before their trip.

I took this on as a separate project from The Longest Way Home! I set up an old domain I had, longestway.com, as a simple site to explain more about the podcast. The team is using genuine guides and topics I’ve written about, and custom wrote for the show. We are letting two podcasters do whatever they want with it—meaning I have no say in how they decipher it (that was tough). More than that, we used AI to set everything up. A whole new learning curve using a controversial subject matter. This was part of the learning curve.

AI is one of the reasons I did not want to host the podcast here: Everything on The Longest Way Home is 100% human-made (by me), and I don’t want to be introducing AI just for a small, fun learning project like this. Can you listen to the podcast here? Well, depending on how it does, I might set up a page so it can be listened to, just like an external YouTube or Spotify player. Other than that, consider the podcast a separate entity for now!

Why didn’t you create The Longest Way Home Podcast?

Because I don’t have the time or resources to produce something that I would consider good enough for listeners to enjoy. I’d have to buy a lot of equipment and carry it around. It’s hard enough to do that with cameras and laptops for guidebook research, etc. Moreover, I’d then have to sync up with another host or guests in between different time zones. Then, I would have to edit the thing … which these days is far more time-consuming than back in the day with simpler audio editing tools. Do I really want to study a guide about online male audio pitches? Not really.

On top of that, you then need to spend a horrible amount of time dealing with podcast distributors, pleading and applying to have your podcast on their network. Thanks to Pocket Casts for keeping things going. Add to all this, there’s zero financial incentive to running a Nepal Travel Podcast! Zero. As in nada. It’s not like a talk show podcast type situation, or a universal subject like cooking, whereby you can start talking about the latest movie reviews, politics, diet fads, or whatever else gets listeners’ attention these days. It’s a podcast about traveling to Nepal. If people are going to listen to it, they are going to do so to find out about topics surrounding their specific reason for travel to the country, and once that’s over … well, they’ll stop listening. Yes, a few expats will like a few of the topics and stay tuned, but to say a Nepal Podcast is going to rock the world and make money through advertising is … quite over the top. Try explaining that to some distributors who only cared about their bottom dollar or minimum subscribers to be hosted.

I really didn’t mind having “advertising” injected into the podcast if it meant a podcast distributor would broadcast our episodes. But, it seems other networks would object as they wouldn’t be their ads. I’ve some experience in network distribution and could understand all this. It still didn’t make it any easier. Thankfully, again, we made it. And, it’s advertising free! Well, aside from our hosts plugging my guidebooks – but then again, why not, it’s our show.

Hence, we did this for fun, learning, and to see if it was possible! And hopefully, deliver a good listening experience to people thinking about visiting Nepal, wanting to learn more about travel in Nepal, and unleash a few topics that will rock the “system” a bit. Well, it wouldn’t be something I’m involved in without upsetting a few in the industry with some hard truths, would it?!

What to expect from Nepal Uncovered: Travel Podcast.

10 episodes have been recorded. They are about 20 minutes in length, so no long head-nodding, listen-before-bed type episodes. They’ll be lively, with two hosts going over a topic that I’ve written about and openly discussing them for you, the listener, to enjoy, learn, and also hopefully have the odd chuckle at.

Part of the chuckle will hopefully come from the excellent artwork each episode will come with. Hopefully, your own podcast player will display the art. Otherwise, the two best places to see the artwork will be on Nepal Travel Podcast itself or YouTube, which allows full-screen illustrations. The latter, was one of the biggest hang-ups for the entire show. Podcast distributors all seem to deal with square images. And, we (alright, just me), wanted the full landscape illustration. We could only do this on YouTube by using a different format. It was time consuming almost to the point where I was being told “is it really worth it?” hint, hint. Well, I finally found a really quick way to do it. So, lessons learned. Though, if there are to be more episodes, I might suggest square illustrations and no funny captions going forward … though again, I’m not sure how that would look. Anyway, check out YouTube or Nepal Uncovered if you’d like to see the illustrations and the weekly jokes within them.

I really fought hard to stay as hands-off this as possible with the podcast discussions. From episodes 1-4, we were really feeling our way. I think from episodes 5-10, we cracked it. I’m really happy with those episodes in particular. So, if you are going to be listening in, do hang in there until episode 5 at least. If there are any corrections, there will be show notes both on Nepal Uncovered: Travel Podcast website and in the descriptions on the various podcasting networks.

Will there be more episodes? Who knows. It was meant to be a two-week project that ended up taking two months. We’ve streamlined it now, so if there are future episodes, it won’t be difficult to produce them. Ultimately, the deciding factor will be if people listen and enjoy it. We enjoyed making it, so that’s been the biggest accomplishment so far. That, learning how to do it all, along with the fact that nobody has done something like this before—I always like that element of things. Basically, if we get listeners, or positivity, there’s a strong chance there will be more episodes.

Update: 9 episodes in and we hit the top 25 Travel & Places podcast on GoodPods. We were not expecting that! Nor were we expecting to have so many listeners with positive feedback. While we were planning to do two seasons a year with 10 episodes each, we’ll simply extend the length of this, our first season, to 20 episodes for now and take it from there.

While the show has it’s own website, we’ll likely scale that side of things back and simply host it here in the future on a single page. Likewise, it seems the team won with the humorous illustration captions and we’ll scale them back too while keeping the individual illustrations. Though I might sneak a few in here and there!

Where can I listen to or subscribe to Nepal Uncovered: Travel Podcast

It takes about 24 hours for new episodes to appear on all Podcast distributors, so new episodes will continue to be on a Monday/Tuesday to start your week off well. We are on the largest podcasting distributor out there, Nepal Uncovered on Spotify (do please add the show and give us a rating), Nepal Uncovered on Apple Podcasts, and for those nice illustrations we are on YouTube Podcasts right now (please like & subscribe).

We’re also on Pocket Casts (shout out to Jim & the team there), Podbean, Castbox, Castro, Sonnet, Podcast Addict, and Podcast Republic.

You can also listen on Nepal Uncovered where there will also be transcriptions. Like all podcasts, you can also just copy the Nepal Uncovered RSS into your own player and listen from there.

Finally, on the Nepal Uncovered FAQ there’s should be a list of more places to find the podcast. There are multiple episodes out now, with more episodes being released on a weekly basis going forward.