Itchy Boots Channel - YouTube

It is perhaps unlikely that you have heard of Noraly Schoenmaker. Certainly, her oddly named YouTube channel “Itchy Boots” is suggestive of entertainment that might not be quite your cup of tea and the title may have lost something in its translation from the Dutch, which is Schoenmaker’s native language, although her English is near perfect.

 

That Noraly is a young woman who bears no resemblance to the pot-bellied Hells Angel image that many of us associate with noisy, high-powered motorbikes will come as a surprise. That she abandoned a career as a professional geologist to take to the road is indicative of a passion that perhaps lurks inside many of us.

 

Softly spoken, and with a love not just for the road and her motorbikes— on which she bestows pet names, and even converses with on occasion— Noraly is as much at home with herself in a motorbike workshop as on a freezing cold high-altitude mountain road in Kyrgyzstan.

 

I came across her YouTube channel by accident or maybe as a result of some clever algorithm that knows me better than I know myself— these days one can never be sure, but either way I have become a subscriber to her channel and might even go so far as to describe myself as a “fan” of Noraly Schoenmaker (becoming a new fan of someone being perhaps an uncommon phenomenon among octogenarians outside the world of sport).

 

Thanks to her, I have learned a lot about geography and also about how, as a species with a reputation for war and mayhem, a surprising element of kindness seems to reside in all our hearts no matter our colour, language, or religion.

 

With the battle lines at times now so harshly drawn between men and women, it is refreshing to perceive how Noraly has managed to bridge that gap with her unique combination of qualities that combine what is best in both female and male. 

 

Reading the comments on each episode, you are left in no doubt of what happiness she has brought to many people’s lives. 

 

I have also read Noraly Schoenmaker’s recently published “Free Ride,” and if you are interested in finding out what it is like to tour the world on a motorbike, I strongly recommend both the channel and the book.

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Below is a sample video from the channel- interesting if you have ever wondered what it might be like to visit   Yemen, a country often in the news and with a very long history. (To unmute the sound simply click on the little "x" next to the loudspeaker symbol near the top right hand corner.)