It was like something out of Don Quixote. Two men on an ancient motorbike bouncing along a dusty, pot-holed road, falling off, skidding into ditches, hanging on to their precariously balanced luggage, pausing, hot and frustrated, to repair punctures or fix an errant exhaust pipe with wire.


It was January 1952, and 24-year-old Che Guevara and his best friend, Alberto Granado, had been on the road for over a month. Guevara had surprised his father and reduced his girlfriend to tears just before Christmas 1951 by announcing he was leaving his home in Argentina and going on his travels. He and Alfredo had been bored and restless and they were both out of work.

"I was a dreamer and a free spirit," Che wrote. "Our fantasising took us to faraway places... and suddenly, slipping in as if part of our fantasy, came the question: "Why don’t we go to North America?"

They never made it to North America, but the adventure took the two young Argentinians 7,000 miles and one year through Argentina to Chile, Bolivia, on to Peru and down the Amazon to Venezuela. But it was in their own country that they had the best of times.

The duo biked south displaying the "resolutely Bohemian ways" which set the pattern for the rest of the journey: cadging meals, nicking bottles of wine and shamelessly scrounging free beds for the night. For our nascent revolutionary it was a lifestyle which owed more to Groucho Marx than his more doctrinaire predecessor.

Che, Alberto and the clapped out Norton 500 - optimistically dubbed La Poderosa, the Powerful One - puttered down the bumpy road into the small town of St Martin de los Andes in the Argentinian Lake District. In his Motorcycle Diaries, the account of their odyssey and now a film which premieres in Cannes on May 19, Che wrote: "Often on our travels we longed to stay in some of the wonderful places we saw, but only the Amazon jungle had the same strong pull on the sedentary part of ourselves as this [St Martin] did."

Fifty years or so later, and he would still be able to recognise the place he described to his mother in a letter home as "a wonderful spot amid a virgin forest, with a beautiful lake," though he would find it a lot busier. St Martin is a burgeoning tourist centre on the edge of Lake Lacar with tidy streets, pleasant hotels, tourist shops advertising fishing trip and horse back treks, ice cream parlours and cafes, even ski hire shops. There's a beach and boats ferry sightseers along the lake which stretches 35 miles between steep pine-filled hillsides. Nearby is the Cerro Chapelco ski resort and on the horizon, the wild National Park of Lanin, topped by the dramatic symmetery of its snow-flanked volcano.

This is one of Argentina’s most popular holiday areas. There’s a fabulous drive through the empty, heavily wooded, countryside of the Seven Lakes region along roads only slightly better than they were 50 years ago. An hour or so from St Martin and you find yourself in Bariloche, a bigger, busier version of St Martin with smart hotels and street of chic A-framed chalets. There is skiing, trekking, horse riding, fishing and rafting on the doorstep and, best of all, a distinctive brand of chocolate.

It was on their rackety drive through the Lakes that Che and Granado tried the ‘old broken headlamp trick’. Feigning lights failure they conned a couple to let them sleep in a hut and then next day, plagued with punctures, persuaded a ‘navvy’ to let them sleep in his shed. Unfortunately they shot his pet dog thinking it was a puma and had to slink away shamefacedly while the owners mourned their lost pet.


Had our two adventurers paused as the road from Buenos Aires crosses the swiftly flowing waters of the Rio Allumine 50 miles east of St Martin they would have found the perfect place to sustain their spirits. After the long empty miles of Patagonia, enlivened only by patches of monkey puzzle trees, herds of sheep and wheeling vultures, the Estancia Huechahue is an oasis of green surrounded by beech, eucalyptus, poplar and pine. In these barren parts - there is one square kilometre for each person - the trees are protection against the savage winds, unrelenting sun and chilling winters.

The estancia is owned by English-born Jane Williams, who moved to Argentina 1978 after her marriage to an Anglo-Argentinian. When her husband died in a farming accident she resolved to open the farm to visitors. Huechahue is a working estancia of 15,000 acres - a little small by Argentinian standards - with 70 horses and 350 cattle. Che would have relished the comfort of the guests’ bungalows set away from the family home which, given its English origins, looks almost like a big brick farmhouse in Shropshire or Hampshire's Meon Valley.


There is room for 12 in the bungalows and guests gather in the house’s dining room for meals. There is something of the ski chalet about the sharing of the day’s adventures - huge enthusiasm and just a little competitive spirit - fuelled perhaps by the unlimited supply of Argentinian wine. Breakfast is wonderful: rich home-made cherry jam and honey from the ranch's bees for breakfast on home-baked bread and eggs straight from the chickens, and for supper, steaks as big as, well, a cow - as you come to expect in this land of meat mountains - or trout straight from the river.

It's a joy to sit on the bungalow verandah in the fastness of the estancia’s garden with its scraggy lawn and little stream, the craggy, uncompromising hills of Patagonia on the horizon.

It is a delight to be woken up by the sound of a horse snorting gently outside the window as it nibbles on the grass. Early evening, and the parrots screech in brilliant green squadrons over the Jesuit apple trees, so called because the missionaries of the 17th century tried to impress the natives with them. The natives killed the Jesuits and kept their apple trees.

There's the regular 'krok' of the buff-chested ibis punctuating the tranquillity, the whir of the Carrancha, a particularly vicious looking hawk, the nonchalant flight of vultures and eagles, the soar and swoop of the condor and by the River Allumine and the darting dives of Martin Pescador - the kingfisher. Take a boat and drift for hours down the river, trying to learn the frustratingly subtle art of fly fishing but succumbing instead to the soothing flow of the water, the warmth of the sun and finally surrendering to a picnic at the water’s edge. Eat home-made quiche of sweet onion and cheese followed by a pudding of peach and yoghurt, down bottles of Quilmes beer as the trout surface nonchalantly yards from your toes.

But we aren’t here just to laze about, after all, this is gaucho country. Dispel the laid back idleness of Che, adopt the bravura - not to mention the pleated trousers, bowler hat and leather chaps - of an even greater Argentinian hero, the mythical gaucho Martin Fierro.


He was the creation of Jose Hernandes a mid-19th-century polymath who celebrated the descendants of the soldier adventurers from Castile in epic verse. Fierro was "hardy as a Viking, truthful as an Englishman, phlegmatic as a Teuton, ferocious and pitiless as the savage tribes of the plain"

And that’s really why holidaymakers come here: to play at being a gaucho. There are days out rounding up cattle, gallops across the plain and sorties with the farm hands to bring in the horses which have been put out to rest. The biggest adventure is a six-day trek into Chile.

Che and Alfredo made the journey to Chile by dusty road and on ‘old tubs’ over the lakes. Their progress was slowed by so many punctures that they ran out of patches and by constant repair work to keep the bike chugging along.



Che was a little wistful about his fleeting visit to the area. He relished the 'ancient forests, the scents of nature caressing our nostrils'... 'looking at the scenery superficially only captures its boring uniformity and that doesn’t get into the spirit of the countryside; for that you need to spend several days in a place'.

And if you do it on horseback, all the better. The treks organised by the estancia are over landscapes that be can reached only on horseback - all very macho, in the saddle all day, living outdoors and washing in streams - though the spartan existence is somewhat ameliorated by being met every evening by hands from the estancia who set up tents and prepare the barbecue of lamb, rabbit even deer or boar.

It's much easier to live out the gaucho fantasy here than it would be in Britain because, as far as the beginner is concerned, horse-riding is designed more for comfort than speed. The saddles are like sheepskin armchairs so that even the utterly inexperienced can sit on the back of a horse, casually holding the rein in one hand (surreptitiously clinging onto the pommel for dear life with the other) and sway along like minor royalty taking a salute.

I managed a half-hearted canter on my second ride, but these horses understand their clients only too well. They know when they have an equestrian duffer on board so they ignore all attempts to speed them on their way and meander along picking their way through the dusty tracks and the lethally spiked shrubs and rocks, stopping to graze whenever the mood takes them.

One evening we rode for 30 minutes, the horses kicking up spirals of dust in the fading sun, hitched up our steeds and clambered for 40 minutes to the edge of the cliff high above the valley. Below us on a ledge, nesting condors.

Jane brought out a bottle of wine from her saddle bag and we watched the sun dip and the condors soar. Ugly creatures with their hunched back and wattles, they become sublime the moment they take off, their huge wings, nine feet across catching the thermals, their talons hanging, ready to scrape the meat off the carrion below.

We made the descent in the dusk, catching glimpses of guanocos, the wild member of the lama family, and deer with huge antlers, leaping effortlessly over five foot high fences as hares started from cover.

Che would have enjoyed that bit - and the supper which followed. And like Che you will want to return. He wrote: "Maybe one day when I'm tired of wandering, I'll come back to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes."

Estancia Huechahue: Journey Latin America tel 020 8747 8315 and 061 832 1441. Price per person, per night (from October) will be £120 per night, full board. The release date for The Motorcycle Diaries has not yet been confirmed; the book is published by Fourth Estate and costs £6.99