is Noraly Shoenmaker outside of You Tube. In 2018 the young geologist stopped scouting mining sites, residing in Holland, and started living on a 300 CC motorcycle. Her home is literally the remote world. She rides on “tracks” or unpaved roads in remote places reporting what she sees. She has filed hundreds of blog posts running about twenty minutes each.

My friend Pete Kreen, a motorcycle enthusiast, tipped me off to her site two years ago. I tuned in to watch her ride from the tip of South America in Puento Arenas, Argentina, near Cape Horn to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Since then she has ridden from India back to Holland and through the Mideast. She is currently riding Africa country to country and is in the Central African Republic. 

She does not tour familiar big cities. She does attempt to always ride village to village so what her more than two million viewers see are rural people in natural habitats. She eats what she can find along the way and has encounters with natives where they live outside of the commercial world that I live in.

Her motorcycle caught my interest first. Because of her small size and need to navigate dirt, she rides a 300 CC Honda that recently fell out of a pirogue (canoe carved from a log) into the Congo River separating Congo from the Central African Republic of Congo. She stirred my inner motorcyclist–I owned a Honda 360 in the 1970s and rode it back and to for work–but my interest in her machine soon gave way to her way of showing humanity to humanity.

She keeps her opinions and private life to herself and is to modesty what Donald Trump is to narcissism. She is an observer of geology, wildlife, and people in a journalistic way that places the viewer aboard her motorcycle and within her geographical location. Her editing skills–she creates all of her content–suggest someone who could publish video for National Geographic. She uses two Go Pro cameras and a drone to capture footage that she edits when she can find electricity and a SIM card to transmit on a laptop. 

Those items are part of the precious weight that she scrupulously seeks to avoid. Viewers have seen her drop her Honda and bog down to her seat more times than I have fingers.  She is an expert in using her small frame to position herself backwards against her fallen motorcycle to raise it. Until I started viewing her site, I thought I knew something about dirt roads from my rural South Carolina upbringing in the 1950s. Little did I know that those slick muddy tracks were comparative interstate highways compared to the rural third world she inhabits.

Through her blogs, I have seen vehicles so entrapped in mud that they have had to be abandoned until a dry season emerges. The “tracked” third world of her travels goes by donkey, camel, foot, and motorcycle. Noraly is weighted down but she often travels along side Chinese-made motorcycles in remote places that convey whole families and household goods. 

I love geography for its own sake and her Itchy Boots taught me more about North and South America than I had accumulated via a long lifetime of learning, yet that is not what places her travels deep in my heart. 

It is her encounters with people. Her Spanish and Portuguese are excellent and her French, adequate; she picks up local languages fast, earning her respect and smiles from natives.

She uses her bright smile and engaging, fearless personality to find out about people she meets and often boards with them in remote places. She is as expert in drawing out the lives of those she encounters as the best of NPR reporters. 

She has taken me into the lives of ordinary people in more than 100 countries. Her method is rooted in allowing them to speak for themselves. Occasionally the viewer gets a whiff of her worldview (especially in regard to wildlife preservation) but not often. She recently pointed out that her sojourn among the Pygmy tribes in Congo gave her a rare chance to feel tall because she was on average a head taller than Pygmies. She went on to say that people in the Netherlands are quite tall. Poof! That remark came and went quickly because she stands at an oblique angle from what typical internet influencers do. 

I am a somewhat melancholy person but every one of her broadcasts fills me with the kind of joy that often sends me to the next room to tell my wife Nita about what I saw in her contact with rural people in villages. She is a humanitarian and roving ambassador to the world in a Jimmy Carter kind of way.

One lone female motorcyclist has show me the goodness of humanity in remote locations around the globe. I hoard programs–she posts two in a good week–so that I have an experience to cheer me up at the end of the day at least once a week. Her audience comments give me a way to test my own experience. “Am I crazy to be so enamored of her reports?” I ask myself. For sure, “No.” Her followers exceed two million and reflect the wonder and joy that I experience, too, in comments that uplift in multiple languages.