TRAVEL

Che Guevara Chris Moss

ROADS TO REVOLUTION - ARGENTINA AND CHILE

Setting out on their gap year odysseys to Latin America, it's unlikely students bother to glance up at the scarlet and black posters of "Che" Guevara stapled on their chimney breasts. They may identify with the handsome Argentine for his romantic heroism and unrelenting idealism, but most are likely to be too busy drinking to stir up revolution as he did in Cuba, Africa and South America.

Yet there is a more prosaic connection - for, seven years before committing himself to Marxism, macho guerrilla warfare and the rural proletariat, 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was an upper-middle-class Argentine medical student bored with studying, his daily routines and his girlfriend. Dropping his studies with only a few exams to go, Ernesto hit the road for six months from December 1951 with his best amigo, a chemist six years his senior named Alberto Granado. As a new film, The Motorcycle Diaries, makes clear, Latin America was already the perfect continent for two young men on a mission, and, if Caracas was the ultimate destination, the real goal was self-discovery, with sex, booze and lots of tango en route.

Ernesto and Alberto started their journey on a stylish but sputtering 1939 500cc Norton nicknamed La Poderosa II (The Powerful One). The first stage took them in a massive U from the city of Córdoba, in the low sierras of central Argentina, down to Buenos Aires (to say goodbye to the Guevara family), west across the pampas, and north through Chile to the Atacama desert.

Guevara's homeland, Argentina, has some great roads. Over 10 years, I set off several times a year on many of them, often with friends, either in an old Ford Falcón or using trains and buses. I hitched through Patagonia on a truck carrying Mendozan wine and used bikes, taxis, horses, and, yes, even a motorbike in the Argentine Lake District. Seeing the film - which prompted me to read the diaries of both Che and Granado - was like going back there for me, because Che's journey is not only significant for its author's ultimate destiny, but also as a celebration of overland travel without the constraints of timetables - and of friendship.

To head south out of Buenos Aires, you take the Mar del Plata highway, which Che zooms down to bid farewell to his beautiful, rich girlfriend, Chichina. Nowadays, you pass advertising hoardings for electric drills, biscuits and cigarettes, as well as small towns and montes (small copses of eucalyptus trees planted to provide smallholdings and gaucho's cabins with shade) - all a reminder that this is Argentina's richest, most heavily populated province. But leaving the coast, the westward roads are dead flat, dead straight strips of shiny asphalt across the southern pampas. The only company to be found is at roadside parrillas - cheap, cheerful steakhouses that grill spicy sausages, black puddings, offal and tender Aberdeen Angus beef.

The prize for crossing the empty farmlands, which eventually lose their lush meadows of clover and their moisture to segue into the drab, brownish wastes of northern Patagonia, is the lonely, potholed Ruta 40. This epic road, which twists through the Andean foothills from the high plains of Jujuy in the subtropical northwest to the shores of the Magellan Strait, enjoys near-mythic status in Argentina: it's a Route 66 from one empty place to another.

Western Argentina is Big Country - the landscapes dazzle even as they diminish one's sense of being. On the fearsome, unmetalled switchback sections of the Ruta 40 that hug the foothills of the Andes, few settlements provide comfort for lonely drivers - especially after dark, when often there is little more than the twinkling night light of an isolated ranch. Once you pause to rest, the landscape is eerily still, leaving you and your vehicle vulnerable beneath the spreading dome of sky. Pitching tents at the side of the road, I would spend the day watching clouds and condors and the night watching shooting stars explode all around.

As Che admits in his diary, there are, however, periods of "morbid fatigue" and monotony. After a fast dash (give or take the occasional breakdown) along the gently winding Seven Lakes road between San Martín de los Andes and Bariloche (the towns and the road are now firmly on the tourist map), he writes that "the sight of a lake and a forest and a single solitary house with well-tended garden soon begins to grate. Seeing the landscape at this superficial level only captures its boring uniformity, not allowing you to immerse yourself in the spirit of the place; for that you must stop at least several days".

A passionate backpacker and ferocious budgeter, Che was a proto-independent traveller, a guerrilla of the gap year - always analysing his experience, questioning his tourist soul. He would have seen modern package trips as pointless exercises in consumption.

Travelling through the Andes via a chain of cold, pristine blue lakes to arrive in the tiny port of Peulla in Chile, the intrepid duo then visit Temuco, still the unofficial capital of the Mapuche Indians, who for centuries resisted Spanish forces. Pablo Neruda spent his childhood there and wrote that "at this frontier, the Far West of my fatherland, I was born into life, to the land, to poetry and to the rain".

Cutting skinny Chile in half is a single, straight dream road: the Pan American Highway, which runs 16,000 miles from the Chilean lakes to Alaska - broken only at the densely forested Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama. Following the Highway, the pair biked slowly up to Valparaíso and, after long days in two-horse towns and moody forests, Guevara was thrilled by the "madhouse museum beauty" of this noble port, with its funiculars, winding staircases and gaily coloured houses spread untidily on the hillsides.

As they travelled, the young freeloaders used a variety of scams, adapting their manners to local style to win favour. Brains, medicine, self-deprecation and natty dance moves got them far almost everywhere they went - though even the generous Chilean charity would not extend to Guevara's tangoing with a local hard man's tipsy wife. The travellers were chased out of town.

Eventually La Poderosa gave up on them - in central Chile, after a fatal collision with a herd of cows. From then on they were basically middle-class mendicants, scrounging lifts, board and scraps of food from patricians and peasants alike.

They stowed away on a merchant ship sailing up the Chilean coast to Antofagasta, on the edge of the Atacama Desert. These days, a 4X4 off-road experience in the "driest desert in the world" is a key part of any tour of the region, and even the mines are sold as "ghost town" sights to photograph. When I visited in 1996, I marvelled at the surreal rock sculptures, the eroded, vermilion and emerald strata, the salt plains and oases.

But when Alberto and Che cadged a lift from Antofagasta to the "cold, glacial" mining town of Chiquicamata, they were struck less by the barren wastes of the Atacama than by the misery of the workers that they came across. As Latin Americans, Alberto and Che became aware of a link between their own lives and the exploitation and hardship they saw.

Entering Peru, Guevara and Granado sensed a fundamental change. Suddenly, the land was high, airless and dry, the culture alien and mysterious. They were enthralled and also unnerved by the Quechua- and Aymara-speaking Indians, who stared at the Argentinian travellers silently, perhaps critically. As they progressed, Guevara came to have a profound sense of being in a somehow truer America. The ruins at Machu Picchu represented the America that Guevara's creole ancestors had eradicated; for Che, they were both a memorial to vanquished indigenous people and a potent symbol of an alternative America - the opposite of his native Buenos Aires fiction of a "Paris of South America" where European mores were the aspirational norm.

The last leg of their trip, through the tropics, was full of colour: they travelled along the Río Ucuyali (a tributary of the Peruvian Amazon), aboard La Cenepa with poker players and a pretty puta (tart); they worked at a leprosarium at San Pablo on the banks of the Amazon; and they sailed towards Leticia in Colombia on a makeshift raft they christened the Mambo-Tango. Then they made the final push by aeroplane to Bogotá and overland by minibus (paid - every hitchhiker has his limit) to Caracas. There the bosom amigos parted ways.

What would Che Guevara have made of Walter Salles's road movie (a yanqui genre if ever there was one) about his early escapades? He'd no doubt have loathed the hysteria associated with film stardom and the inevitable T-shirts and tack the film will spew as it goes on release across the capitalist West and East. He'd probably condemn the packaging of his personal, passionately lived motorcycle journey as a tourist trail.