First trip across Latin America

On December 29, 1951 in Córdoba, Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado began their trip traversing South America on a motorcycle that they called “La Poderosa II”

On December 29, 1951 in Córdoba, Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado began their trip traversing South America on a motorcycle that they called “La Poderosa II” [The Powerful II].They went pass Buenos Aires, the Atlantic coast, Bahía Blanca, Choele Choel, Piedra del Águila, San Martín de los Andes and Bariloche. They crossed the Andes towards the south of Chile and there from they headed to Santiago, where they had to leave the motorcycle behind. By boat, on foot and hitchhiking they knew several cities in Chile, Bolivia and Peru. In Lima, they established contact with the physician Hugo Pesce, distinguished specialist in leprosy, and leader of the Peruvian Communist Party. Through him, they travelled to San Pablo leper colony, on the banks of the Amazon river and then, in the “Mambo-Tango” raft they sailed downstream towards Leticia, a city in the Colombian frontier, where they worked as football trainers. They went to Bogota and then to Caracas, Venezuela, where Granado was hired in a leper colony. Ernesto decided, then, to go back to Buenos Aires via Miami with the aim of finishing his medicine studies.


“The character that wrote these notes died when he stepped on Argentine soil again, the one who orders and improves them, “me”, is not me; at least, not the same inner me. This wandering through our “Majuscule America” has changed me more than I had ever thought it would”.Ernesto Guevara 
“Entendámonos” from “Notas de viaje” 
("Let’s understand each other”, from “The Motorcycle Diaries”)“To doctor Hugo Pesce, without knowing it perhaps, provoked a great change in my attitude towards life and society, with the same adventurous spirit as always, but channeled toward goals that are more harmonious with the needs of America