that traces the early travels of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, then a 23-year-old medical student, and 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.
[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.