Travels with Che

Every resort and island restaurant  in south-east Asia has a book shelf; novels tourists have polished off on the beach, and don't want to haul all the way back home. Most of it is trash, spy thrillers and romances. And very little of it is in English. It's amazing how many Tom Clancy novels have been translated into Swedish.
Sometimes it's not a matter of what you want to read. It's more what there is to read.
The Motorcycle Diaries was the only book in the tiny island resort collection that didn't have a gun or flower on the cover. Sounded like a travelogue, which mildly interested me. Then I read the back: it was Che Guevara's travel diary.
This could be pretty random, I thought. And I wasn't really in the mood for revolutionary diatribe. But it was either that or an eight-year old book about the future of the Internet. So I bring it back to my room and start reading.
"This is not the story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic," the book begins. "at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams."

One of these guys is Che Guevara. I think.
He didn't have a beard then.
 The guy with the hat is Alberto, his travelling buddy.
 That I'm pretty sure of. (Stolen from a website that stole if from the book.)

What unfolds before me is the story of a young doctor and his friend. It's 1951, and they're at the cusp of their careers, completing their education as doctors. Their specialty is leprosy, still a frightening and mysterious disease back then, especially in third-world South America.
It's the story of two young men on a travel adventure on a beat-up, failing old motorcycle. They start in their hometown in Argentina, leaving behind girlfriends, drinking buddies and worried parents.
While I sweat through the heat of a muggy tropical evening, they freeze through the Andes and up the mountainous west coast of the continent. They drink mate, an Argentinian tea, scrounge for food, and suffer from altitude sickness. They stowaway on ships, beg for beds at distant relative's homes and gladly accept invitations to get royally drunk. They make friends playing soccer, sharing blankets, and treating lepers like human beings.
They are simply young men on an adventure. It's impossible not to look for foreshadows of what Che would become (at least, what I think I know what he will become) but they are few and far between.
He didn't know his future when he wrote this diary. He was just Ernesto, a young med student with a poetical streak, far from home. While on a ship, working his passage up the coast:

"There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly- not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things, the outer limits would suffice."

In the end, I got what I wanted to read after all. A travelogue from the past. The book offers fascinating glimpses of long-gone Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela. It's about travel before there was on-line booking, Lonely Planet guides, ATMs. When the kindness of strangers still counted.
The book is composed of just short passages, a few notes from this place, or about that funny incident in another. If he was that age today, The Diaries would have been a blog.
I finish the book the day I leave Koh Kradan. I hop on the speedboat. Across from me is a young man, in dreads, with his girlfriend. On his t-shirt is Che Guevara.
I see Ernesto time and time again after that, on t-shirts and posters, his face co-opted into a meaningless symbol. I still know next-to-nothing about the political Che, the revolutionary Che, the 39-year-old killed by CIA-backed counter-insurgent forces in Bolivia in 1967.
But it's like I knew him when he was young. We traveled together, for a while.