The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
In 1950, 23-year-old Che Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado decided to take a year off from their studies to travel South and Central America on a motorbike they named La Poderosa. Carrying few possessions and little money, they left Buenos Aires for a nine-month journey through Argentina, Peru, Chile, and several other countries. Along the way, they slept in fields and barns, visited leper colonies, fell off the bike more times than they could count, worked aboard a steamship in exchange for free passage, and witnessed the poverty and injustice that would inform Guevara's infamous revolutionary career.
Quote:
"At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. ”
Author:
Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967) was a doctor, writer, and guerrilla leader who played a large role in the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s. He was captured and executed in 1967 while attempting to gather a guerrilla militia in the mountains of Bolivia.
Published: 1993
Length: 175 pages
Set in: Argentina; Chile; Peru; Ecuador; Colombia; Venezuela; Panama; and Florida, United States