In the spring of 1952, two young men set out by motorcycle on an ambitious, footloose journey that they hoped would carry them from Buenos Aires up the spine of Chile, across the Andes and into the Peruvian Amazon. They made it, a little behind schedule, though the unfortunate motorcycle did not. Their road trip -- inspired and audacious it might have been -- could have faded into personal memory and family lore, even though both travelers produced written accounts of their adventures.
The older, a 29-year-old biochemist named Alberto Granado, is still alive and appears at the very end of The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles' stirring and warm-hearted reconstruction of that long-ago voyage. Granado's companion was a 23-year-old medical student named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, whose subsequent career as a political idol, revolutionary martyr and T-shirt icon -- Che! -- reflects a charismatic, mysterious glow onto his early life.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PANDASIA
"Is it possible to be nostalgic for a world you never knew?'' Ernesto wonders as he contemplates Inca ruins in the Peruvian highlands. Salles' film, as ardent and serious a quest as Ernesto's turned out to be, poses a similar question.
In making their movie, the cast and crew retraced the route of Granado and Guevara three times, trying to connect not only with the varied, rugged landscape of South America but also with the hopes and confusions of an earlier time: an era before the Cuban revolution, before the military coups and dirty wars of the 1960s and 70s, before the democratic resurgence and economic catastrophes that followed.
The filmmakers are not so naive as to suppose that the old days were simpler or more innocent than the present. The movie's feeling of freshness and possibility comes from the wide-eyed intelligence of its heroes.
What The Motorcycle Diaries captures, with startling clarity and delicacy, is the quickening of Ernesto's youthful idealism and the gradual turning of his passionate, literary nature toward an as-yet-unspecified form of radical commitment.
In declining to follow the subsequent course of that passion -- into the Sierra Maestre, the Congo and the mountains of Bolivia, where Guevara met his bloody end -- Salles risks being accused of idealizing his subject.
It's a fair charge, but one that misses the director's fidelity to his literary sources. Guevara's diaries, discovered in a knapsack long after his death, were published in 1993, and much of their appeal lies in the sense of immediacy they convey. Their author did not know who he would become, even as the notebooks themselves dramatize a crucial stage in his development.
At the beginning, at home with his bourgeois Buenos Aires family, Ernesto (Gael Garcia Bernal) is not Che, but "Fuser'' -- sensitive, asthmatic and perhaps a bit of a dilettante. Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna) -- lecherous, plump and gregarious, full of good-natured, blustery trash talk -- is Falstaff to Fuser's Prince Hal.
While there is a worthy goal at the end of their journey -- they intend to work in a leper colony in Peru -- the main purpose is tourism, both high-minded and low. They want to see as much of Latin America as they can -- more than 8,000km in just a few months -- and also bed as many Latin American beauties as will fall for their ridiculous pick-up lines.
At the end of the film, after his sojourn at the leper colony has confirmed his nascent egalitarian, anti-authority impulses, Ernesto makes a birthday toast, which is also his first political speech. In it he evokes a pan-Latin American identity that transcends the arbitrary boundaries of nation and race. The Motorcycle Diaries, combining the talents of a Brazilian director and leading actors from Mexico (Bernal) and Argentina (de la Serna), pays heartfelt tribute to this idea. In an age of mass tourism, it also unabashedly revives the venerable, romantic notion that travel can enlarge the soul, and even change the world.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
At Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urged the government to subsidize AI. “All schools in Taiwan must integrate AI into their curricula,” he declared. A few months earlier, he said, “If I were a student today, I’d immediately start using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok to learn, write and accelerate my thinking.” Huang sees the AI-bullet train leaving the station. And as one of its drivers, he’s worried about youth not getting on board — bad for their careers, and bad for his workforce. As a semiconductor supply-chain powerhouse and AI hub wannabe, Taiwan is seeing
RSS