The boys and girls would gather around to dance, but Ernesto was a really bad dancer. He had a bad ear. We'd be playing one style of music and he'd be dancing to another. 

 

The adolescent Ernesto was known for being hypersexual. His first experience was with the family maid. He would try to seduce any woman of any shape, age or appearance. 

 

One of Ernesto’s more unusual traits is his lack of hygiene which earns him the nickname “Chancho” meaning “pig” in Spanish. He had a shirt called the weekly shirt because he would only change it once a week. We called him “Chancho” and it stuck with him eversince. But he didn’t mind. He kind of liked it. 

 

Yet, for all of Ernesto's wild antics, he possesses a very introspective side. “ He was always searching for a kind of the meaning for life.” He was more advanced than his peers. He read serious authors. Nehru and Gandhi and Steinbeck and Faulkner and Mussolini. He was a voracious reader. 

 

Though he enrolls in medical school. Ernesto's true education comes from the trips he takes through undeveloped Latin America.

 

Alberto Granado was an older student. He proposed that the two take off for a journey by motorbike, the links of Latin America. It was a quest to look beyond the privilege confines. It were his birthright. Putting his medical degree on hold, Ernesto and Alberto head out on an old Norton motorbike nicknamed 'La Poderosa II' on January 4th 1952. 

 

'All we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight outward. They travelled down to Patagonia, and crossed to Chile where La Poderosa finally gave out. Ditching the bike, they travel on foot and hitch rides on the back of trucks, heading for the interior of Chile. They travelled up to see the world’s greatest open pit copper mine Chuquicamata which loomed large in the imaginations of Latin Americans at that time because it was US owned and runned. It was this notion of the kind of monstrous capitalist enterprise exploiting the local workers. American companies like Anaconda and Kennecott monopolized Chile’s mining industry. 

 

American companies went to Latin America for two reasons cheap raw materials and cheap wages. To young nationalist and a young idealist of the early 1950s, it would be very hard to look upon US policies as practiced in Latin America kindly. He saw some that he hadn’t seen before. He saw the face of poverty. 

 

Ernesto being who he was, was terribly bothered by what he had seen. From Chile, Ernesto and Alberto head to Peru and then continue on to Venezuela. After seven months on the road, Alberto decides to stay in Venezuela while Ernesto returns home to Buenos Aries to complete his last year of medical school with a new social conscience.