If you ride and you have a serious injury, it sucks. You probably don't need me to tell you that.
Your feelings may differ based on how you hurt yourself, as well as how bad the injury is. Whether the injury occurred on the bike, or off the bike. But at the same time, if it's a bad enough injury to stop you from doing the riding that you love, it's just a rough situation all around.
If you've been watching round-the-world moto traveler Itchy Boots on her YouTube channel for the past few years, you've probably been amazed more than once. Her riding skills are strong, and of course probably only getting stronger because she's out there riding every single day.
Additionally, she has impressive language skills, and she clearly also has a cast iron stomach. And amazingly, she's remained largely free of serious injuries throughout her years of moto travel in far-flung destinations. A broken hand a few months back seemed like the most serious thing so far, but even that only kept her away from her bike for a shorter period of time than you'd probably guess.
That is, until now.
2024 has apparently been a bit of a rough time for Noraly. While traveling down a pretty good road in Tanzania, after having left the city of Mbeya, she hit a rut wrong and went down hard. It wasn't a particularly bad or deep rut, and she repeatedly goes back to it afterward in the video because she almost can't believe this seemingly insignificant thing is what caused such a serious problem.
But she can feel that her collarbone is broken, and maybe her foot as well. So, she grabs her Garmin inReach satellite beacon, and she sends a message to a friend asking them to send help because she can't lift her bike back up, and she's reasonably certain she can't ride anymore right now, either.
Naturally, there's no traffic on this road for some time while she's lying there, waiting and hoping for a vehicle to come along. But eventually, a truck comes by and she's able to get some help.
As it happens, the truck that picks Noraly and Alaska up is driven by some doctors, we find out in her second video update after the injury. After the hours-long journey back to Mbeya to get to the nearest hospital, x-rays show that her foot is actually OK.
However, as Noraly thought, her collarbone was indeed broken and separated, and she was going to need surgery to fix it. She decided to ship Alaska and herself both back home to the Netherlands so she could get the surgery she needed and recover at home.
And Then Things Get Complicated
In the second video embedded just above, Noraly gives an update on how things are going. As it turns out, there were some complications with her surgery, including more bone fragments than she'd realized and a collapsed lung that happened in or after surgery.
Through it all, from the injury to the post-surgery vlog update, Noraly remains remarkably calm. I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty angry about the collapsed lung situation since it didn't happen in the crash (but maybe that's just me).
In any case, Noraly also says she has her first book coming out soon (in Dutch; an English-language version should come eventually, but she doesn't know when). This clearly wasn't how she wanted to release her first book, but you can't really control what's going to happen when your life is one big adventure, right?
We at RideApart wish Noraly good healing and good traveling in the months to come.
