"The first commandment for every good explorer is that an expedition has two points: the point of departure and the point for arrival. If your intention is to make a second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don't think about the means - because the journey is a virtual space that finishes, and there are as many means as there are different ways of 'finishing'. That is to say, the means are endless.

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From here I took over the controls, accelerating to make up for precious lost time. A fine sand covered part of a bend and - boom: the worst crash of the whole trip. Alberto emerged unscathed but my foot was trapped and scorched by the cylinder, leaving a disagreeable memento which lasted a long time because the wound wouldn't heal.

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A heavy downpour forced us to seek shelter at a ranch, but to reach it we had two get 300 meters up a muddy track and we went flying twice more. Their welcome was more magnificent but the sum total of our first experience on unsealed roads was alarming: nine crashes in a single day. On camp beds, the only beds we'd know from now on, and lying beside La Ponderosa, our snail-like dwelling, we still looked into the future with impatient joy. We seemed to breathe more freely, a lighter air, an air of adventure. Distant countries, heroic deeds and beautiful women spun around and around in turbulent imaginations.

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My tired eyes refused to sleep and in them a pair of green spots swirled, representing the world I had left for dead behind me and mocking the so-called liberation I sought. They harnessed their image to my extraordinary flight across the lands and seas of the world.

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At, night after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. 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 too long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice. As all the sentimental themes the sea inspires passed through our conversation, the lights go the end of our adventure as stowaways, or at least the end of this adventure now that our boat was returning to Valparaíso.

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We hung one of our blankets between a telegraph post and a distance marker and got under it - a Turkish bath for our bodies and a sunbath for our feet. Two for three hours later a small Ford passed by containing three noble citizens, all roaring drunk and singing cuecas at full blast. They were striking workers from the minas Magdalena, celebrating the victory of the people's cause a little prematurely vying getting happily plastered. The drunks took us as far as to the railroad station. There we encountered group of labourers practising for a football match

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... said farewell to the Pacific with one last swim (soap and everything) and it served to awaken a dormant yearning in Alberto: to eat seafood. We began a patient search for clams and other seafood on the beach by some cliffs. We ate something salty and slimy, but it didn't distract us from our hunger or satisfy Alberto's craving, in fact it wouldn't even have made a prisoner happy. The slime was repulsive and, with. nothing to season it, worse. We set off at our usual time, after eating at the police station, marking out our track along the coast until the border post installed in comfort. We met a customs officer who had worked on the Argentinian border, and acnknowledging and appreciating our passion for mate he have us hot water, cookies and, best of all, found us a ride to Tacna. The police chef welcomed us amiably at the border with several pretentious inanities about Argentines in Peru and with a handshake, we said goodbye to that hospitable Chilean land.

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When I made these travel notes hot and fresh with enthusiasm, I wrote some things that were perhaps a little flashy and somewhat removed from the indeed spirit of scientific inquiry. ... Beginning with our area of expertise, medicine: the panorama of health care in Chile leaves a lot to be desired (although I realized later it was by far superior to that in other countries got to know). Free public hospitals are extremely rare and even in those, posters announcing the following appear: 'Why do you complain about your treatment if you are not contributing to to the maintenance of this hospital?' Generally speaking, medical attention in the North is free, but hospitals accommodation has to be paid for, and prices range from petty sums to virtual monuments to legalized theft.

 

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The political scene is confusing (this was written before the elections in which Ibáñez triumphed). /.../ Chile as a nation offer economic promise to any person disposed to work for it, so long as they do not belong to the proletariat: that is, anyone who has a certain dose of education and technical knowledge. The land has the capacity to sustain enough livestock (especially sheep) and cereals to provide for its population. There are necessary mental resources to transform it into a powerful industrial country: iron, copper, coal, tin, gold, silver, manganese and nitrates. The biggest effort Chile should make is to shake its uncomfortable Yankee friend from its back, a task that for the moment at least is Herculean, given the quantity of dollars the United States has invested and the ease with which it flexes its economic muscle whenever its interests appear threatened."

 

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The stars drew light across the night sky in that little mountain village, and the silence and the cold made the darkness vanish away. It was - I don't know how to explain it - as if​ everything solid melted away into ether, eliminating all individuality and absorbing us, rigid, into the immense darkness. Not a single cloud to lend perspective to the space blocked any portion of the starry sky. Less than a few meters away the dim light of a lamp lost its power to fade the darkness. 

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I saw his teeth and the cheeky grin with which he foretold history, I felt his handshake and, like a distant murmur, his formal goodbye. The night, folding in at contact with his words, overtook me again, enveloping me within it. But despite his words, I now knew ... I knew that when the great guiding spotty cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people.​​"

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The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto Che Guevara, 1967, 2003