The Motorcycle Diaries
Overview
 
The Motorcycle Diaries is a memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...

 that traces the early travels of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, then a 23-year-old medical student, and his friend Alberto Granado
Alberto Granado
Alberto Granado was an Argentine–Cuban biochemist, doctor, writer, and scientist. He was also the youthful friend and traveling companion of revolutionary Che Guevara during their 1952 trip around Latin America, and later founded the Santiago School of Medicine in Cuba...

, a 29-year-old biochemist. Leaving Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

, Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

, 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.
Quotations

[voiceover] We look like outlaws inspiring admiration everywhere we go. We’ve left civilization behind and we are much closer to the land.

A revolution without guns? It would never work.

The deeper we go into the Andes the more indigenous people we encounter, who are homeless in their own land. All across our own land.

What we had in common - our restlessness, our impassioned spirits, and a love for the open road.

How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?

You gotta fight for every breath and tell death to go to hell.

(To Alberto): Are you talking to the motorcycle again?

What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

Even though we are too insignificant to be spokesmen for such a noble cause, we believe, and this journey has only confirmed this belief, that the division of American into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race from Mexico to the Magellan Straits. And so, in an attempt to free ourselves from narrow minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a united America.

Wandering around our America has changed me more than I thought. I am not me any more. At least I'm not the same me I was.

 
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