On the Trail of the Mighty One
On the trail of The Mighty One
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
RANDOM SNOW FLURRIES SLANTED across my headlights like small javelins, but inside my car the CD player glowed warmly.
"Donde esta la estacion deferrocarril?" a male voice asked me, ferociously trilling every "r" in the Spanish word for "railway?" I quickly repeated the phrase twice, my tongue clicking against the roof of my mouth like a pair of castanets. I sounded just like him.
Yes, folks, I was reviewing what little Spanish I'd retained from high school, and had bought myself some instruc tional CDs. They purported to be the same ones used by our State Depart ment and CIA. Who better to learn from than Yanqui spooks, who have been meddling in Latin America since the early days of James Monroe?
Why these sudden language lessons? Well, two reasons, really.
First, I'd just returned from a 1000mile off-road trip through Baja, and had felt let down by my poor language skills, vowing to improve them when I got home. And, second, I'd come home from Mexico just in time to see a movie called The Motorcycle Diaries, based on communist revolutionary Che Guevara's famous travelogue by the same name.
For those of you who haven't already seen it, here's the basic story: In 1952, young medical student Ernesto Guevara Lynch and his buddy Alberto Granado set off from their native Argentina, two-up on a 1938 Norton 500, to tour South Ameri ca. Granado called the bike La Poderosa, or "The Mighty One." The pair make it all the way south into Patagonia, across the Andes and halfway up the coast of Chile before their much-abused big British Sin gle finally disintegrates. They complete the trip hitchhiking through Peru, Bolivia, Columbia and Venezuela by flatbed truck, train, raft and airplane.
Both buddies later published diaries of the trip. Granado's account was called Traveling with Che Guevara: The Mak ing of a Revolutionary Scenes from both their books were used to make the movie.
And an excellent movie it is, I think.
I should inteiject here that I have never been much of a Che Guevara fan. One of my roommates in college had a big poster of the guy on his wall, but I’ve always cast a jaundiced eye on politicos who don’t like freedom of speech. Also, shooting your critics without trial always sets a bad tone in government. Good things almost never happen after that.
Other than those few glaring fatal flaws, of course, Guevara had many admirable traits. He was highly intelligent, a bom romantic, absolutely fearless and an intrepid world traveler, despite a life-long battle with asthma, right up until he was captured and executed in Bolivia in 1967.
And, at the time he wrote his Motorcycle Diaries, at least, he was very funny. The book is full of dry, hilarious comments and droll understatement, without too much proselytizing. And so is the movie.
There are rumblings of the forces that would later turn Che Guevara into Fidel Castro’s second-in-command, but it’s mostly a beautifully filmed, well-acted road story about two young men on a motorcycle adventure in the Fifties.
Which I guess is why I’ve seen it twice. So far. Simply put, the movie makes you want to run out of the theater, fly to South America, grab a motorcycle and start touring, preferably through the Andes and Patagonia. The scenery in the movie is that stunning.
Hence the Spanish lessons. And the pile of books now sitting next to my reading chair.
I just re-read my hardcover copy of Motorcycle Diaries, which was given to me by my friend Diane Almond when it first appeared in English back in 1995. I’d forgotten how well-written the book is; Guevara could have spent his life as a
travel writer, and we’d all have a shelf of his stuff.
In fact, he could have written a whole second book on an earlier trip he took in 1950, riding his bicycle-with a Ducati Cucciolo engine mounted on it-on a 2400-mile tour of northern Argentina.
Che rides the first Ducati! Maybe he could have been saved. “You have nothing to lose but your chains,” would have acquired a whole new meaning.
After reading all that, of course, I had to run out and buy Granado’s book, which gives a slightly different perspective of the same trip. (Granado moved to Cuba to join his old friend Che after the Revolution, and is still there.) That, in turn, caused me to pick up yet another volume on the subject, published in 2000, called Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend.
American author Patrick Symmes re-traces the old Guevara/Granado route with his BMW R80GS, camping where they camped, stopping where they stopped, and commenting on the legacy of Che Guevara. Symmes is a terrific travel writer, and this book alone will make you want to quit your job and tour South America, never mind Che and his Norton.
A more harrowing account of riding into Latin America is provided by Glen Heggstad’s Two Wheels Through Terror. Heggstad made it into the mountains of Columbia before he was kidnapped by communist rebels of the ELN. He survived five weeks of beatings, starvation and marching through the jungle before he was released in a truce/prisoner exchange. Friends in the U.S. sent him another Kawasaki KLR650, and he continued the trip. This guy is not a quitter.
A fine book and-with obvious reservations-more inspiration to explore the hemisphere to our south. Something I’ve never done.
This reading binge, and its attendant Spanish lessons, may have been set off by The Motorcycle Diaries, but when you read some of the more modern travelogues you are left with one small irony: It’s the violent godchildren of Che Guevara-the merciless ELN and the psychotic Shining Path guerrillas-who are the biggest threats to your health and survival these days.
I guess the trick is to go anyway, and ride around them. As history seems to be doing.
