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I discovered Itchy Boots in the dark days of the pandemic, when, like a lot of riders who were self-isolating, I was bored out of my skull and jonesing for a road trip.
The oddly named YouTube channel was the brainchild of a cheerful blonde Dutch woman who was riding a Royal Enfield around India. The videos weren't much on plot or production — just here-to-there shorts with a minimum of narration and context — but I was drawn in by the exotic scenery and the host's boundless cheer and infectious smile.
I've been a fan ever since of Itchy Boots and its effervescent creator, Noraly Schoenmaker. As she gained experience with both video production and riding, the videos got longer and more in-depth. Still, they showed only what she wanted us to see, or what there was room for in each episode. Was it as easy as she made it look? What went on behind the scenes? What was her motivation to sell her house, quit her job, leave her home and family behind, and become a world traveler?
The answers to those questions and more are in her new book, Free Ride.
After discovering her partner had been cheating on her, she left the Netherlands and went on a solo backpacking trip to India. The plan was to support herself as a travel blogger, but her stories didn't sell, and her financial situation grew more desperate by the day. After a chance meeting with a man who rented motorcycles, she hit on the idea of combining her love of motorcycling with a format ideally suited to motorcycle travel — video — and the Itchy Boots channel was born.
When she set off from India on her first long motorcycle trip, she quickly learned that riding her Ducati Monster around the placid roads of her native Netherlands in no way prepared her for dodging chaotic Indian traffic or navigating steep rocky grades aboard a rented and overloaded Royal Enfield of suspect reliability. She had virtually no off-road skills, and her Himalayan spent almost as much time on its side as on its wheels. When she was lucky, she had help picking it up. She wasn't always lucky. The only upside was that she was too busy just trying to stay upright to dwell too much on the bitter breakup that drove her to quit her job as a geologist, sell her house, her motorcycle, and almost everything she owned, and hit the road.
Since then, she's ridden well over 100,000 miles in more than 70 countries. If you've watched Noraly's videos from the beginning, you've seen her progress from a wide-eyed tourist to a seasoned and capable world traveler. Free Ride tells how that transformation came about in more detail than the videos ever could. Learning how to pack, how to cope with the tangled red tape of border crossings, and how to ride on local "roads" were hard-won lessons. Suffering from the cold in Kyrgyzstan during that first trip, as seen in the video below, was one example.
In stark contrast to the sunny, never-say-die enthusiasm always on display in her videos, there were times when she was cold, hungry, scared, lonely, and frustrated with her own inexperience. Noraly records them fairly and faithfully, pulling no punches in describing how clueless she was at times — and how lucky, especially in the people she met along the way, from hotel managers to fellow RTW riders to just plain folk who stopped to help her when she was in need, or to give her a bottle of water, a seat by the fire, or a meal with no expectation of payment.
Free Ride isn't a rehash of the video series. It's much more than that, and a very good travel book even if you’ve never watched the Itchy Boots channel. The writing is clean and lucid, mercifully free of travel-writing cliches ("stunning vistas" and "breathtaking scenery") and full of insights about life on the road. Far from wandering around for its own sake, Noraly decided early on that she wanted to "create and tell visual stories about people and places that not everyone knew… [show] a side to the world I saw every day, but that was often snowed under by all the negative stories, wars, and misery."
With more than 2.7 million subscribers to her YouTube channel, Noraly Schoenmaker has already succeeded as a motovlogger. Now, with Free Ride, she has established her credentials as a writer, as well. The book is not only a fitting companion for the video series, but a good stand-alone story in itself. It covers only the first season of Noraly's travels, a nine-month trek from India to the Netherlands, which was completed five years ago. Since then the channel has gone on to include Africa, Scandinavia, and an epic — and pandemic-interrupted — ride from Patagonia to Deadhorse, Alaska, which I hope means more Itchy books to come.
On sale, not on tour
Free Ride lists for $29.99 and can now be pre-ordered. It will be released on June 3.
Noraly had planned to do a U.S. book tour to support sales, but late last week she announced in a social media post that she had reluctantly canceled those plans.
In a post on Facebook, she cited several reasons for the decision. U.S. immigration officials are reviewing social media and her recent travels in the Middle East, especially Yemen, could bring her under additional scrutiny. She knows other Europeans who have been detained and deported by the United States, and while she has a current U.S. visa, if she were deported it could hurt her ability to get travel permissions elsewhere in the world. Also, if she were detained, all the work and expense that goes into putting together a multi-city book tour would be wasted.
"I never thought I would say this, but it doesn't feel safe to travel to the U.S. right now," she wrote, adding that "I'm gutted it's not going to happen now."
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