On The (unpaved) Road

Getting Salty in Salta: these are the salt flats that we finally reached after a 10 hour bus ride through the mountains on an unpaved road. 
The Motorcycle Diaries is a memoir that catalogues the adventures of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his friend Alberto on their journey across Latin America. In addition to being an adventurer and a doctor, Guevara is most widely known for his controversial role in many guerrilla expeditions throughout Latin America in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He spent much of the later part of his life instigating government rebellions, and was eventually killed on one such mission in Bolivia by Bolivian soldiers acting on orders from Washington in 1967.
Ernesto Guevara was given the nickname “Che” throughout his travels because of his Argentine roots (“Che” is a popular term used almost exclusively in Argentina to mean “cool” etc). The memoir follows Che and his good friend Ernesto as they journey from Buenos Aires, Argentina westward to Argentine Patagonia, into Chile, and north through Peru, Colombia and Venezuela on a beat up old motorcycle. They begin their travels with very little money in their pockets and therefore spend much of their time fixing the bike on the side of the road, going to bed hungry in a small tent, and occasionally meeting generous people who provide them a place to sleep and a few good meals.
One aspect of their travels that stuck out to me was that most of the writing focused on the voyage from place to place. When they finally arrived at their destination, after pages and pages of what seemed like arduous travel, they provided very little detail about the final location in which they had spent the duration of the journey discussing. I started to realize that their expedition was, literally, a motorcycle diary. It focused on the act of traveling, and each stop they made was not nearly as important to their personal experience as the events that took place in between them.
This made me think about my own experience, because until this past weekend my travels have focused on very different aspects of the trip. Throughout my first few trips down here I was with my parents, and it was generally acknowledged between our group that we wanted to spend as little time on the road as possible. We were so focused on getting to reaching the objective that I lost track of the actual traveling part. I let the process of getting from one place to another frustrate me because I looked at each delayed flight as something that was keeping me from reaching my destination, instead of embracing them as part of the journey.
This past weekend we went on a class trip to Salta and Jujuy, and it was the first time since I have been here that I really enjoyed the entire trip. There were sixty of us in our group and we spend a majority of the trip on the bus getting from one place to another. Maybe it was because I was with a lot of my close friends, but after the first few stops on the rickety unpaved highway, I sank into the rhythm of this intermittent routine and was eager for whatever was coming up next.
The trip was a roller coaster of excitement, boredom, altitude sickness, miscommunication, and a general lack of modern civilization, but after I returned on Sunday night I realized that most of the good memories and hilarious stories occurred in those moments of transition; spilling coke on myself of the flight, meeting local children while waiting to board our bus, misplacing passports, leaving credit cards in ATMs in towns whose name I can’t even pronounce, and the many grueling but necessary pit stops on the boulder infused road to nowhere.
The ups and downs of the trip to Salta reminded me of Che and Alberto’s never ending problems with the motorcycle, the random illnesses that seized them, their countless hitch hiking endeavors, and their eagerness to embrace something or someone new.