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Once again, from Patrick Symmes...

"... Travel was a constant act of reduction, of eliminating minutae layer by layer until a substrate of hard reality emerged, welcome and fair, from beneath so many illusions. There were no office politics on the mountain, no ringing telephones, or incessant advertising pitches, no cloying waiters or whining yuppies or monthly dunning notices. It seemed obvious from the perspective of a motorcycle seat what linked Guevara's ramblings to his revolutionary urges; the need for the extraordinary. Travel was a series of exceptional moments, a template of the heroic life Che would later seek..."

" ...The friction of time was also a friction of mutual expectations. Foreigners sought out the "pure" and "unspoiled" indigenous culture of the Andes but found the reality of modern intermingling here. There was an ancient dance at the centre of the crowd, and a boy in a Metallica T-Shirt watched raptly. Just as subatomic particles were altered by the act of observing them, our own presence was a corruption of the thing we came so far to see. Maybe Douglas Tomkins was right: perhaps it was better to have no audience at all, to let a vacuum of silence fell over the last examples of a dissapearing culture..."