Ernest Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries

“I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.”

This book has been on my “To Read” list for a long time solely because it focuses on travels across South America, which is what I am currently experiencing. While at times Guevara’s writing was uncomfortably racist and culturally insensitive in my opinion, I did find that I was able to relate to many of his experiences in traveling throughout Peru. I have even been to most of the places he wrote about so I was able to envision his life hitching rides with Quechua hablantes and sharing meals with impassioned storytellers. Overall, I thought learning about the path that led a young Che Guevara to become the face of the Cuban Revolution was very interesting.