This is, bar none, my favorite motorcycle travelogue. I picked it up at a bookstore one night, frankly, because it was on the end of a shelf, front facing outwards, and it caught my eye because it had "motorcycle" in the title. That is the sole reason I bought the book. My old roommate had a passing interest in Che Guevara, enough to make me question how much I really wanted to read a book about him, but I supressed my suspicions and read the book anyways. This was a good decision. This book taught me about Che. This book taught me about motorcycling. This book taught me about guerilla warfare in South America. I learned about culture, about a people that were desperate for a hero, and the hero that rode in hitchhiking after his motorcycle died, carrying stories of leprosy and healing and revolutions and gunshots along with a friend named Alberto Grenada and a tattered diary. Patrick Symmes traces Guevara's footsteps (tire tracks?) through South America, stopping for information in huge metropolises and towns that live and breathe a dream, solely because "El Che" stopped there overnight one evening in 1952. This book is extremely well-written and engaging. If you're interested in history at all, I really can't recommend this book enough.

Buy it from Whitehorse Press