(0) In January 1952, 23-year-old medical student Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist, set (1) from Buenos Aires, Argentina on a sputtering single cylinder motorbike. They wanted to discover (2) South America they had read about in books. By the end of the journey, they had travelled over 8,000 kilometres across such inhospitable places (3) the Andes, the Atacama Desert and the Amazon Basin.
The journey had a significant impact on Guevara, (4), after witnessing extreme poverty and social injustice, vowed to do something about it. The (5) significant moment (6) Guevara was his visit to a leper colony. It was here that Guevara decided (7) to continue his career (8) institutional medicine. Instead, he (9) become a ‘doctor of the people’ – tending (10) who could not afford the treatment.