Volume 4, Issue 1: Spring 2008

The Motorcyclist as Revolutionary: Looking for Mr. Guevara

Barbara Brodman

In 1996, I found myself in Cambridge, England, browsing through Heffer’s bookstore, which was featuring a recently published English translation of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s motorcycle diaries.[1] As a Latin Americanist, I was very familiar with the life and works of Che Guevara, the 20th century revolutionary, who had served as a leader of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuban-backed insurgencies in Africa in the mid-1960s, and an unsuccessful attempt to revive the Bolivian Revolution in 1967 that had cost him his life. But Che, the young man, was something new, and his diaries could provide important insight into his subsequent life as a revolutionary.

I read the diaries, I dreamed, and wondered how things had changed in two generations.

In August, 1997, I set out to recreate the journey through South America embarked upon in 1951 by a young Guevara, at that time an Argentine medical student, and his friend Alberto Granado. On that journey, Che discovered human destitution and his own destiny. His diaries revealed the process by which a young tourist/observer became the revolutionary of his generation.

Guevara and his companion made their way from Argentina to Chile on an old Norton 500 motorcycle, which, as Che described it, “gave up the ghost” (44) outside Santiago. From there, they stowed away on freighters, hitchhiked, rafted on the upper Amazon, and eventually made their way to Venezuela. In his diaries, Guevara recorded the harsh and deficient conditions of mining towns, leper colonies, and indigenous communities that typified life in the region for the majority. The trip wrought psychological changes in Che which are the subtext of his writings.

In my own diaries and multimedia production, I examined the revolutionary legacy left by Guevara and the evolutionary path on which Latin America moves today. First by motorcycle, then hitchhiking on land and water, my Mexican research assistant, Yosefa Ugav, and I made our way from Argentina to Caracas, following as closely as possible the original route made by the young Argentines some forty-five years earlier.

The one planned deviation from the original route would put us in Bolivia for the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara’s death in early October 1967. This would require us, as novice riders, to depart Cordoba, Argentina not in December, as did our predecessors, but in mid-August, traversing the Andes and traveling through Chile, by motorcycle, in mid-winter. A challenging deviation, indeed!

As I stated in a press interview shortly before my departure, I was not interested in marketing the myth of Che Guevara. What I sought was the essence of the man who may have best expressed the frustrated aspirations of the Latin American masses, impatient for a better life.

Che spoke of erasing old social and philosophical concepts, and going instead with an inquiring mind and a humble spirit, to learn from that great source of wisdom that is the people. That is what I planned to do, but within a new framework. The end of the Cold War cleared the revolutionary playing field of ideological debris and paved the way for evolutionary change that would have been impossible in Che’s time. Yesterday’s subversives had become the cult heroes of today’s upwardly mobile set. With a new millennium beckoning, 1997 was the ideal time to assess change and continuity in Latin America and to discover their implications for the future. That I followed Che’s original path of discovery seemed both timely and appropriate.

As to the adventurous nature of my quest, I ask you, what’s so adventurous about a woman with little motorcycle experience riding across the Andes in mid-winter; trekking through deserts, mountains, jungles and plains; while, at every turn, confronting physical danger and financial uncertainty? To me, it sounded like the perfect vacation!

So, on August 15, 1997, I air shipped the 1987 Honda Shadow I purchased and learned to ride two months earlier to Buenos Aires, then freighted it some 400 miles northwest to Cordoba for reassembly. It was a frustrating experience; but, after eight days and almost $1,000, neither of which I’d planned on, the journey began in earnest.

Fear and Loathing in Cordoba (August 20-22)

I awoke in a cold sweat. It was reality time. The bike would be ready to roll in a few hours, and I wasn’t sure that I remembered how to ride it. I’d never ridden with luggage aboard.

Until now we’d carried our heaviest pieces on a luggage cart I brought with me from Miami. I wasn’t at all sure that we could fit all of our stuff into the saddlebags and sissy bar pack that was our bike luggage.

As I donated the luggage cart to the Hotel Dorrego, memories of adventures past flowed through my mind. In none of them was I faced with getting an overloaded motorcycle I barely knew how to ride out of congested Latin American traffic and onto the highway south to Patagonia.

Miraculously, we fit most of our belongings onto the bike and secured them to the best of our ability. It was show time.

I jumped on the bike to feel out the new weight. It teetered precariously. I saw death, or at least intense humiliation, at the base of the hill from which, if lucky, we would turn into traffic from hell. For one brief, calming instant, I rationalized that, worse case scenario, we sell the bike here and proceed by bus to Chile.

“Oh, come on! You can do it,” said Yosefa. I sensed forced optimism. “You didn’t think we could get here yesterday either, but we did.”

She had a point. But yesterday I wasn’t carrying an elephant on my back. And, as a passenger, she had no idea how terrified I was riding from Moto Ruta, the shop that had reassembled the bike, to the hotel.

With nothing to lose but our lives, I was goaded into going for it. And, miraculously, we made it out of town and on our way toward Rio Cuarto, the first stop on a six-thousand-mile journey that had now begun in earnest. For the first time, I felt proud that I had named my bike “La Poderosa III,” after Che’s bike, though I hoped that my Poderosa would be a bit more reliable than Che’s old Norton.

Our first stop for gas was a minor triumph. We had made it out of Cordoba and were cruising on almost empty roads. Now I had time to appreciate the generosity of Cordoba drivers. Normally anarchical and unyielding behind the wheel of a car, they had accepted our tenuous and extremely gringo-like driving with equanimity, even smiles. The Florida plates had done the trick and, probably, saved us.

By the time we reached Rio Cuarto, some four hours later, I knew that we would make it all the way. I had adjusted to the unfamiliar weight behind me and to the pounding of gale force winds off the pampas. We had surpassed our longest previous ride on a motorcycle by hours. The weather was unseasonably mild. Life was good. We found a roadside hotel and settled in for the night. The road southward to Patagonia beckoned.

Flamingos on the Pampas (August 24)

A short way outside of Rio Cuarto, the bike bumped and swerved violently and mysteriously. I’d seen nothing in the road to explain such a jolt. But we were safe and cruising smoothly again, so I forgot about it and turned my attention to finding gas.

Some ten miles further, we pulled into a lonely gas station. It seemed strange that there weren’t more amenities on the main road south. As I dismounted the bike, one mystery was solved.

“We lost the bag,” I thought I heard Yosefa say. But that couldn’t be. It’s difficult to hear with a full-face helmet on.

“We lost the bag!” No denying it this time. Visions of computer, video camera, assorted electronic equipment, and all our most important papers, squashed and strewn across the highway filled my head. The mystery of the bump in the road was solved.

The real situation was more bizarre. We had lost the huge bag mounted on the sissy bar behind my traveling companion, but it had not detached itself fully from the bike. We had been cruising for ten miles at 55 miles an hour, dragging sixty pounds of luggage. Neither of us had felt a thing after the initial bump. Apparently, no one else found the situation very strange. None of the motorists who passed us had responded with the slightest gesture.

Amazingly, only a couple of corners and straps of the bag were damaged. The contents, all our delicate electronic equipment, were unharmed. We had survived our first potential crisis. Our luck still held.

The mystery of the deserted highway was also solved. We had made a wrong turn outside of Cordoba and were headed west, not south, on a secondary road. We reattached the luggage, this time securing it properly, turned around and set out again for Santa Rosa.

About two hours into our journey, the Pampas opened into a vast network of shallow lakes, on which ducks and other migratory birds frolicked in the spring sunlight. Then, as if to wrench my thoughts back to reality, an anomaly: flamingos in the Pampas. There they stood, legs in the letter “P” transforming the northern landscape into a postcard of the Everglades.

Birthday in Bahia Blanca (August 26)

In Bahia Blanca we were again on the route taken by Che and Alberto in 1952. Our winter departure had made it more logical to travel directly south from Cordoba through the pampas, rather than along the coast of Buenos Aires. What was a series of lively summer resort towns for Che and his companion would have been cold and desolate monotony for us. But now we were back on course.

Like Che and Alberto, we now felt a little lonelier but a good deal freer. We had completed the first thousand kilometers of our journey with no major mishaps.

It was my birthday, and it occurred to me that I was the only person ever to have spent her fifty-fourth birthday retracing a dead revolutionary’s motorcycle journey through South America. It also occurred to me that I was a bit nuts.

The next day, heading west into Patagonia, we encountered the worst roads so far. Sixty miles of potholes, road construction, and a steady stream of trucks hurtling at warp speed across the pampas challenged my novice skills. Fortunately, the roads improved, though the trucks and wind remained a constant.

In Transit to Another Conception of the World (August 29-30)

There are two routes to Bariloche from Neuquen. One is the primary route, which runs directly southwest to Argentina’s tourist playground. The other route, which we judged impossible for us on the bike at this time of year, detours northwest through Junin de los Andes and San Martin de los Andes, first on secondary roads, then, from San Martin to Bariloche, on gravel.

This secondary route, the “Seven Lakes Route,” was the one chosen by Che and Alberto. They spent two weeks in the area. They had problems with the bike, and Che suffered immensely from the cold, even in summer. But the place inspired him. Here he made his first political observations about the indigenous population, whom he described as not “very communicative on the whole, typical of the subjugated Araucanian race, still wary of the white man who in the past brought them so much misfortune and still exploits them” (24). Here Che wrote the words that inspired this journey: “Maybe one day when I’m tired of wandering, I’ll come back to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes, if not indefinitely at least in transit to another conception of the world” (26). There were no Araucanians here now; but I had the distinct feeling that I, too, was in transit to another conception of the world.

Because it was winter, we planned to make Bariloche our base and take side trips to Junin and San Martin by bus. Instead, I missed a poorly marked turn south of Piedra del Aguila and ended up on the very road I was determined to avoid. The ride from there to San Martin was the most difficult of our journey.

I didn’t know it at the time but the early spring weather we had enjoyed so far, borne on powerful north winds, was about to blow itself out. To keep the bike upright, I had to lean precipitously into the gale-force wind. At one point, vicious cross winds momentarily stalled the engine. All I needed in addition to everything else was a roadside breakdown. My neck and shoulder muscles were strained almost to the breaking point.

For some two hours we had no idea where we were, though the lack of traffic and condition of the road made me fear the worst. Another wrong turn took us north to a beautiful scenic vista called La Rinconada and the first road sign we’d seen in hours. It confirmed my suspicion that we were on the secondary road to San Martin de los Andes.

From La Rinconada we looked out over the river valley below to the snow-capped cordillera, all too close for comfort under these conditions. It was cold now, and incredibly windy. La Rinconada allowed me to locate our position on the map. I had no alternative but to turn back a few miles and continue on to Junin and San Martin. We had almost no gas and no time to return to the intersection where we originally went wrong. In a couple of hours the cold, and perhaps snow, would set in.

We battled freezing cold winds to Junin, where we found gas and hot mate. By now I was exhausted. San Martin was only twenty-five miles or so away and I wanted to get there pronto.

As we pulled out of the gas station onto the highway I dumped the bike in the middle of the highway. It was a textbook case of driver error. I started into the turn with the front wheel turned too sharply to the left, tried to compensate by braking and cranking the wheel to the right, hit the throttle instead; and, crash.

We were stunned. My first thought was of Yosefa. I knew that I wasn’t badly hurt; and as soon as I saw that she wasn’t either, I turned my attention to the bike. I saw gasoline leaking onto the pavement.

“Oh, no! The bike! What did I do to the bike?”

Meanwhile, four men came to our rescue and were attempting to right the bike and get it out of the highway. Everything looked intact. Only the right mirror was bent out of shape. Humbly and shaking, we resumed our course toward San Martin. We’d assess our cuts and bruises when we got there.

A few miles outside of San Martin it began to rain. It was so cold, the roads turned to ice before we found a hotel. When we pulled into the Hotel El Viejo Esquiador, we were beat but, oh, so appreciative of our new, warm surroundings.

The next day, we assessed our options. There were only two: continue to Bariloche the short way on some twenty-five miles of unpaved road, or backtrack some ninety miles to where we went wrong initially and continue to Bariloche on the main highway. We chose the longer but safer battle against cold and wind.

In Bariloche I dumped the bike again; this time traveling steeply uphill the wrong way on a one-way street. It seemed only appropriate that we should stay at the hostel we fell in front of. Again, a local helped us right the bike and we limped to our new refuge.

It was September first. The temperature in Bariloche had fallen to minus five degrees Celsius. It was only slightly warmer in Buenos Aires. Springtime had fled Argentina with a vengeance. And it couldn’t have done so at a worse time.

Ahead of us was crossing the pass to Chile. In this weather, snow seemed a certainty, and we doubted we could traverse the unpaved pass under the best of conditions.

To make matters worse, it was an El Niño year. Unusually high precipitation had seriously damaged roads and bridges. The ubiquitous words of warning rang in my ears: “Winter is no time to ride a motorcycle in Argentina.” It was an insane time to ride over the Andes. I guess that’s why we hadn’t seen a motorcyclist on the open road since leaving Cordoba!

We stayed in Bariloche for three nights, hoping the weather would change in our favor. We could stay no longer. We had to find a truck to take us over the pass.

Since San Martin, everyone had told us not to worry. The pass was easy. The unpaved section was clear and posed no threat to us or the bike.

It wasn’t until we were about to leave for Villa de Angostura, the last stop before the pass, that the owner of the hostel told us to go to the customs compound on our way out of town to look for a ride. There trucks bringing lumber from Chile unload their shipments and return empty to Osorno and beyond.

Oh, joy! The prospect of finding a ride from Bariloche to Chile pulled us out of our slump. It certainly beat going on to Angostura with hopes of finding a ride there. I preferred not to leave our fate to last minute arrangements.

At the customs compound we met some truckers who offered us a ride but had the wrong kind of vehicle for a motorcycle. They assured us that other trucks, more appropriate to our needs, would be by soon. We were elated.

The customs agent burst that bubble a half hour later. He emerged to inform us, very politely and sympathetically, that hitchhiking with commercial truckers was against the law. If we did so, no matter how willing the driver, we ran the risk of losing the bike and causing serious trouble for ourselves and our benefactor at the border.

“Now what do we do?” We had two options: go to Angostura and find help there or ride through the pass to Chile on the bike. For the first time, we were forced to face the probability that option two would prevail. I was not pleased. Yosefa was terrified.

It rained all the way to Angostura. Yosefa’s small backpack was digging into my back. Every muscle in my body was contorted into painful knots. I was fighting the road, the weight of an overloaded bike, and a dark foreboding of things to come. Dark foreboding was winning.

In Villa de Angostura, we found a lodge, the Hosteria Las Nieves (“the snows,” bad name right about then!). We threw back a couple of well deserved scotches and settled in for a night of comfort, though in the back of our minds we thought this might be the last night of comfort for a while.

Sometime during the night, the rain stopped. We awoke to a much colder, overcast sky. The Vermonter in me recognized snow clouds on the mountains.

By breakfast I was determined to accept the inevitable and go for it. The lodge owner, Guillermo, assured us that we would make the pass easily.

By the second coffee, we were begging Guillermo to find us a truck to take us to Chile. As he attempted to do so, and we waited, it started to snow.

Che and Alberto had crossed from Bariloche to Chile by boat. They had the good sense to begin their journey in summer. The landscape in the seven lakes district and the surrounding mountain areas was magnificent. Perhaps some day I, too, would return to see it under more favorable conditions. But right now, my mission was to get us out of there in one piece.

The snow intensified. After an hour, a commercial automobile transporter called to offer his services. He wanted 250 American dollars to take us to the Argentinean border, some thirteen miles from Angostura and on this side of the stretch of dirt road we needed to avoid. The situation didn’t look good.

Federico to the Rescue (September 5)

The weather had cleared. Frost lay everywhere. We went early to breakfast, eager to hear if another truck that Guillermo had contacted yesterday had room for us and the bike.

The news was not good. The truck was full. No one else appeared willing to take us over the pass to Chile.

We were becoming resigned to the idea of going it alone. We couldn’t stay here longer. Guillermo continued to insist that the ride was “no problem at all.”

“Only a short part of the road is unpaved,” he assured us. “The gravel is as smooth as asphalt. There are no stones—no stones at all. You will have no problems, believe me!”

We didn’t believe him. We trusted his good intentions, but our instincts told us that this was going to be anything but easy.

I dressed for the worse. Layers of clothing, electric socks and hand warmers, all would keep me warm and, more importantly, protect me from falls. I hoped.

I warmed up the bike and faced the inevitable. As I struggled to turn the bike around on the gravel driveway without falling (“Not yet, please!”), a small pickup truck pulled into the drive behind me. It didn’t occur to me at the time that it had come for us. Then I saw Yosefa’s face. She and Guillermo were talking to the driver with purpose. Could it be that our luck still held?

Indeed, it did. The young man before us, who identified himself as Federico, had been riding motorcycles since he was sixteen. He raced dirt bikes and, as a result, his father’s truck was equipped with a ramp of sorts and transport straps to hold the bike securely in the short bed. He had heard of our plight and come to the rescue.

We bargained somewhat half-heartedly on the price. Out of pity, I think, Federico reduced his original price of $200, which included $80 he would have to pay to bring the vehicles over the border, to $150. And he agreed to take us all the way to Osorno, Chile.

The first few kilometers were dry, smooth asphalt. We were feeling a bit embarrassed. Then we hit dirt. The road that followed was muddy and tortuous. Federico confirmed what my intuition had told me. To attempt this road on the Honda would have been crazy. We couldn’t have made it without mishap.

I had marveled at Federico’s ability to maneuver the bike into the truck bed on the narrow board that served as ramp. I had no idea how he would back it down onto the parking lot of our hotel in Osorno.

On the first attempt the bike bottomed out on the edge of the truck bed. Federico and I lifted it back into the truck and searched for an upgrade against which to back the truck and narrow the angle of descent. The rest was comical.

The only upgrades in sight were two recently planted decorative gardens on either side of the narrow parking lot entrance. Federico and I smiled at one another, looked around for witnesses, and made our decision. While he maneuvered the truck into position against one bank, running over the other in the process, I went to find a block of wood to reinforce and elevate the ramp plank.

Meanwhile, two hotel employees came to help. One of them was the gardener. Together they lowered the bike down the ramp and Federico moved the truck back into the underground parking lot.

There was a tense moment as the gardener assessed the damage to his recent handiwork. We all laughed. Though a few shallow ruts marred the formerly smooth surface of the gardens, not a plant had been touched.

We paid Federico and bid him good-bye with a beer and genuinely felt thanks for having saved us (and the plants) from disaster.

Santiago or Bust (September 7)

It was overcast and raining lightly when we left Osorno. Some six hours later, we arrived in Temuco. Most of the ride had been in pouring rain. We now had to be in Santiago by September 10, two days earlier than I had planned in my working itinerary. We’d read that several overlapping events were to occur there on September 10 and 11. In anticipation, Santiago officials had mobilized 5,000 policemen in and around the capital.

On September 10, Chile would face Argentina on the soccer field in a World Cup qualifying game. In any Latin American city this is serious business. Regardless of the game’s outcome, it was sure to trigger acts of vandalism, theft, and perhaps violence. Game day preceded the anniversary of the 1973 military coup and the traditional pilgrimage to the General Cemetery in memory of Salvador Allende, the Socialist ex-president killed during the U.S.-backed military takeover. This was to be the last September 11 ceremony in which General Augusto Pinochet would participate as Commander-in-Chief of Chile’s armed forces before his announced retirement. Officials were eager that the ceremony be peaceful, despite the potentially volatile combination of events.

I, of course, wanted to be there.

Neither of us was excited about facing another day of rain and wind. Yesterday had been a six-hour nightmare. After the first half hour my cotton glove liners were soaking wet. Changing them for warmer and drier ski gloves wasn’t an option on wet roads frequently obstructed by road construction, killer winds, and the ubiquitous trucks from hell. After an hour or so, I realized that my Harley boots were filled with cold rain. Next time, I’ll know not to buy boots with laces.

The trip from Temuco to Chillan was more of the same. It was a little clearer at times, but it was colder. The road began to steadily ascend. Soon pouring rain turned to sleet and hail. I wanted to stop. I was cold, wet, and more than a little afraid of sliding out of control on the ice. The winds and trucks showed no mercy. The sky promised no respite from the cold and rain. It would get worse as afternoon set in, I was sure. I decided to push on.

We were in logging country. As I looked around me at miles of once virgin forest now stripped bare, non-indigenous second growth pine and eucalyptus sticking out like a second day growth of beard on an ailing earth god, I wanted to cry. Lumber trucks were everywhere overburdened with the Chilean lumber that would provide homes, building supplies, and paper products for people around the world who had already decimated their native lumber stocks and were now intent on devouring those few virgin forests that still remain to all of us. Billboards erected by mainly U.S.-based multinationals displayed newspeak phrases like “forest project,” to mask the real intent to trade patrimony for profit.

It occurred to me that Che’s experience, forty-five years earlier, had been different in one significant way. He had seen human degradation that he found unbearable, especially as a physician. He would later write: “As a result of the conditions in which I travel, I have discovered that it is impossible to heal children who are ill due to poverty, malnutrition and constant repression” (Loviny 25). But he had not seen the environmental degradation that we faced; and, that, I sensed, might alter everything. This was an important insight of my journey.

To the General Cemetery (September 11)

As gunshots rang out, feelings of fear and anticipation were palpable. A collective murmur spread throughout the marching thousands: “Do not respond! It’s what they want!” We were half way to the General Cemetery.

Though the three hour march from downtown Santiago to the General Cemetery and Salvador Allende’s tomb has been a yearly event since 1989, this year was special. It marked two extraordinary events: the long awaited retirement of Augusto Pinochet and the thirty year anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, whose assassination, like Allende’s, was presided over by the CIA. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was to be the most significant homage to Che that I would experience on my journey.

For me, the march was deja vu. Tens of thousands of people of every age, profession, economic status, united in their quest for peace, justice, and opportunity for all, brought me back some twenty-five years to my hippie, grad student days. Their songs and banners, tee shirts and placards, and just their presence—joyously defiant university students; middle-aged intellectuals and activists, whose hard-edged defiance revealed years of persecution and exile; disenfranchised workers; and mothers of the disappeared, whose silent defiance, pictures of their loved ones held high, was loudest and strongest of all—revealed a revolution of expectations that will not be easily quelled. I found myself hoping that, through these Latin Americans, we can finally achieve what, twenty-five years ago, my generation in the United States traded off for consumer comforts.

My reverie ceased as we approached the cemetery. Ski-masked provocateurs had emerged from the crowd and were vandalizing a bus kiosk close to the cemetery gates. It was the provocation the military needed.

For the next few hours, I battled mace and tear gas and tried to find my way out of the immense cemetery alive. Through it all, I saw a level of determination and cooperation on the part of the Chilean people that gave me hope. Here the sense of community was stronger than that of self-preservation, and I was grateful.

When the coast was clear, Yosefa and I set out for the subway station. We asked three teenage boys for directions. They refused to let us go alone. As we walked, I talked with them about education, economics and politics. These were poor kids, but their awareness of local, national, and global issues was astounding, as was their commitment to grassroots solutions to the most pressing problems facing their nation and the world. I wished young people in the United States were as well informed and committed. The kiss good-bye I gave to each of them was anything but perfunctory. Through them, I had received another important insight: This was to be a very different experience from Che’s in human terms. Where he had found despair, I would find hope for the future.

The End of the Road for La Poderosa III (September 16-17)

It was time to say good-bye to Poderosa, but getting out of Santiago was a chore. The first shipping agent we contacted stalled and changed procedures for almost a week before we realized that he wanted to force me into selling him the bike for practically nothing.

By Monday, the situation was desperate. We had to leave the hotel. It was much too expensive, and I was getting dangerously low on funds. I favored continuing north on the bike in hopes that we could sell it or ship it from Iquique. I thought the trip through the Atacama Desert would be easy and very beautiful.

Yosefa had other ideas. She hated the bike. She refused to go near it again. She wanted to go home. I didn’t know what to do.

Then my luck changed. I managed to reach a friend from Miami who was living in Santiago. He put me in touch with a highly respected customs agent who assured me that he would handle all aspects of shipping the bike. My friend also took me out for the best dinner I’d had in Santiago. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the last such meal I’d have on this journey.

The next morning I said good-bye to Poderosa III.

I videotaped the humorous scene of three businessmen from the customs agent’s office attempting to lift a 600-pound motorcycle into a pick-up truck. A panicked call for reinforcements nearly emptied the office but produced the muscle power needed to complete the task at hand.

As Che had described in his diary, “the big day finally arrived on which two tears ploughed symbolically down [my] cheeks and, with one last wave to La Poderosa..., we set off” (48) towards Arica and beyond. The show would, after all, go on.

But the script was about to change. I was almost broke. I’d spent over nine thousand dollars, six thousand of which was the purchase and shipping of the bike. I had only one thousand dollars left, with no possibility for more. And I still had over two months and four countries to go.

Never let it be said that I turned away from a challenge. From now on I would travel more like Che and Alberto: on a very fine shoestring, and afoot.

At about the same stage in his journey, Che had written: “How long this present order, based on an absurd idea of caste, will last I can’t say, but it’s time governments spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money, funding socially useful projects” (52).

The “present order” to which Che referred has changed significantly, but the problems to which he referred still remain. It is the hope of many of us worldwide that non-governmental organizations, working directly with and for the people can, finally, induce governments to assume the role for which they were created: to serve and protect the people. But such thoughts would have to wait. I had a journey to finish.

By mid-afternoon, Yosefa and I were hitchhiking north, through the Atacama Desert. Before, it had been the bike that was overloaded. Now it was me. I was carrying all of the electronics: computer and video equipment, electrical converter and adapters, and a multitude of other gadgets, as well as my clothes, books, and personal effects. I kept reminding myself that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Thoughts of thin thighs and a tight butt kept me from crying. However, never did we have a bad hitchhiking experience. Indeed, time after time, we marveled at the kindness of Chileans toward foreign visitors.

In his diary, Che described a different situation: “This was a new stage in our adventure,” he wrote. “We were used to attracting idle attention with our strange garb and the prosaic figure of La Poderosa II, whose asthmatic wheezing aroused pity in our hosts. All the same, we had been, so to speak, gentlemen of the road. We’d belonged to a time-honored aristocracy of wayfarers, bearing our degrees as visiting cards to impress people. Not any more” (49).

Perhaps it was that we were women. Perhaps things had changed. But, without the bike, Yosefa and I were treated as kindly as we had been with it.

We were both unknowns, Che and I, when we made this journey. I assumed that being a woman, and from the United States, would make my adventure more dangerous and difficult. I was wrong. Men and women alike befriended me and aided me on my journey. I sensed by now that a common bond was developing between people everywhere who seek an end to institutionalized inequities born of a neo-mercantile order designed to support the interests of the few at the expense of the many and at the expense of the planet that supports us. This, to me, was a hopeful sign.

After the motorcycle journey, nothing seemed impossible. At least, not to me. Yosefa soon went home, too exhausted and terrified to go on. But I kept heading northward, stumbling into one adventure after another. As an inexperienced rafter, I joined an extreme rafting expedition and bungled my way into breaking records (and a few bones) on the treacherous Apurimac River, in Peru. With a new partner in adventure, Chachi Pacheco, I continued my journey through drug wars and into jungles and leper colonies, abandoning a sinking river boat on the Amazon and, finally, rowing 600 kilometers to Brazil in a dugout canoe.

Since then, I’ve dedicated myself and the not-for-profit organization I founded to saving the Amazon rain forest. I was looking for adventure and new insights into the Latin American condition when I set out on my journey. I found a new passion.

Che, too, had been moved by the people and spirit of the Amazon. He had vowed to return to Argentina and further minister to the medical needs of the lepers in the region. Che’s journey led him, instead, down a path from physician/healer to philosopher/warrior. It was, perhaps, a logical path for him at a time in history dominated by Cold War ideologies that pitted the social realities of South America against First World notions of democracy and development.

The poverty and inequities introduced to Che on his 1952 journey were a bludgeon thrust to his youthful innocence that compelled him to seek solutions in the Communist cause.

By 1997, much had changed in South America. Systems and institutions that have perpetuated poverty and inequity in the region for over half a millennium were being significantly challenged. Vastly improved systems of transportation and communication, both regional and global, had helped eliminate some of the worst abuses witnessed by Che and made it possible to create non-violent networks for change through which further reforms could occur.

New problems had arisen as well, particularly in the areas of natural resource utilization and the environment. It is toward these issues that my journey turned me.

I haven’t forgotten that all this started with a motorcycle journey. I have always been a bit of an adventurer and a revolutionary, but now I am a biker. If Che’s motorcycle hadn’t broken down in Santiago, I think he would have continued northward through the desert, despite his fears. So my husband, Chachi, and I plan to help him do that, in spirit at least, and help the people of the rain forest whom he never managed to get back to, by organizing a fundraising motorcycle expedition through the Atacama Desert, from central Chile to Northern Peru, sometime in the near future. Perhaps I’ll call that story Quantum Che.

Notes

1 Parts of the text for this essay were previously published in the Introduction and Editor’s Note of my book, Looking For Mr. Guevara: A Journey Through South America (iuniverse.com, 2001). See Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America, trans. Ann Wright (London: Fourth Estate, 1996). Unless otherwise noted, all diary entries are quoted from this version.

Works Cited

Guevara, Ernesto Che. The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Fourth Estate, 1996.

Loviny, Christophe. Che: The Photobiography of Che Guevara. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1997.

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