The Motorcycle Diaries (Spanish: Diarios de motocicleta) is a posthumously published memoir of the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It traces his early travels as a 23-year-old medical student with his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist. Leaving Buenos Aires, Argentina in January 1952 on the back of a sputtering single cylinder 1939 Norton 500cc dubbed La Poderosa ("The Mighty One"), they desired to explore the South America they only knew from books. During the formative odyssey, Guevara is transformed by witnessing the social injustices of exploited mine workers, persecuted communists, ostracized lepers, and the tattered descendants of a once-great Inca civilization. By journey's end, they had travelled for a "symbolic nine months" by motorcycle, steamship, raft, horse, bus, and hitchhiking, covering more than 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) across places such as the Andes, the Atacama Desert, and the Amazon River Basin. The book has been described as a classic coming-of-age story: a voyage of adventure and self-discovery that is both political and personal. Originally marketed by Verso as "Das Kapital meets Easy Rider", The Motorcycle Diaries has been a New York Times bestseller several times.
Pre-expedition
Ernesto Guevara spent long periods traveling around Latin America during his studies of medicine beginning in 1948, at the University of Buenos Aires. In January 1950, Guevara attempted his first voyage. He traversed 4,500 kilometres (2,800 miles) through the northern provinces of Argentina on a bicycle on which he had installed a small engine. He arrived at San Francisco del Chañar, near Córdoba, where his friend Alberto Granado ran the dispensary of the leper-centre. This experience allowed Guevara to have long conversations with the patients about their disease. This pre-expedition gave Guevara a taste of what would be experienced in his more extensive South American travels. The journey broke new ground for him in activities that would become central to his life: travelling and writing a diary. His own father called it preparation for his subsequent long journeys across South America. Guevara relied upon the hospitality of strangers that he encountered, as he and Granado would throughout their later travels. For example, following a puncture, he flagged down a lorry to take him to his next destination. In another instance, in Loreto, he asked for hospitality from a local police officer when he had nowhere to stay. The trip encouraged Guevara's style of traveling that would be seen in the Motorcycle Diaries. By the time he reached Jujuy, he had decided that the best way to get to know and to understand a country was by visiting hospitals and meeting the patients that they housed. He was not interested in the sites for tourists, and preferred meeting the people in custody of the police or the strangers that he met en route with whom he struck up a conversation. Guevara had seen the parallel existence of the poverty and deprivation faced by the native populations. Guevara also noted 'turbulence' in the region under the Río Grande, but having not actually crossed this river, Guevara, historian Jon Lee Anderson argues, used it as a symbol of the United States, and this was an early glimmer of the notion of neocolonial exploitation that would obsess him in later life. For the young Guevara, the trip had been an education. It was the success of his Argentinian "raid", as he put it, that awakened in him a desire to explore the world and prompted the commencing of new travel plans. Upon completion of his bicycle journey, El Gráfico, a sports magazine in Argentina, published a picture of Guevara on his bike. The company that manufactured the engine Ernesto had adapted to his bicycle tried to use it for advertising, claiming it was very strong since Guevara had gone on such a long tour using its power. While he continued studying, he also worked as a nurse on trading and petroleum ships of the Argentine national shipping-company. This allowed Guevara to travel from the south of Argentina to Brazil, Venezuela and Trinidad.
Expedition
This isn't a tale of derring-do, nor is it merely some kind of "cynical account"; it isn't meant to be, at least. It's a chunk of two lives running parallel for a while, with common aspirations and similar dreams. In nine months a man can think a lot of thoughts, from the height of philosophical conjecture to the most abject longing for a bowl of soup – in perfect harmony with the state of his stomach. And if, at the same time, he's a bit of an adventurer, he could have experiences which might interest other people and his random account would read something like this diary. In January 1952, Guevara's older friend, Alberto Granado, a biochemist, and Guevara, decided to take a year off from their medical studies to embark on a trip they had spoken of making for years: traversing South America on a motorcycle, which has metaphorically been compared to carbureted version of Don Quixote's Rocinante. Guevara and the 29-year-old Granado soon set off from Buenos Aires, Argentina, astride a 1939 Norton 500 cc motorcycle they named La Poderosa II ("The Mighty II") with the idea of eventually spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo Leper colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River. In total, the journey took Guevara through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and to Miami, before returning home to Buenos Aires.
The trip was carried out in the face of some opposition by Guevara's parents, who knew that their son was both a severe asthmatic and a medical student close to completing his studies. However, Granado, himself a doctor, assuaged their concerns by guaranteeing that Guevara would return to finish his degree (which he ultimately did). Their first stop was Miramar, Argentina, a small resort where Guevara's girlfriend, Chichina, was spending the summer with her upper-class family. Two days stretched into eight, and upon leaving, Chichina gave Guevara a gold bracelet. The two men crossed into Chile on 14 February. At one point they introduced themselves as internationally renowned leprosy experts to a local newspaper, which wrote a glowing story about them. The travelers later used the press clipping as a way to score meals and other favors with locals along the way.
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