Che Guevara and Alberto Granado: The 1952 Journey

Granado, who ran the dispensary of a leprosarium near Córdoba, had long talked with Guevara about crossing the continent. In early 1952 they decided to take a year off — Guevara still had exams to pass before qualifying as a doctor — and loaded Granado's old Norton with luggage. Their declared goal was to spend a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo leper colony in the Peruvian Amazon. Guevara's family worried; Granado promised he would bring him back to finish his degree, which he did.

Location precision: The pin marks central Buenos Aires, the starting point.

Their first stop was not on the way to anywhere: Miramar, a small Atlantic beach resort where Guevara's girlfriend, Chichina, was spending the summer with her well-off family. A planned two days stretched into eight. When he finally went, Chichina gave him a gold bracelet. Then the two friends turned south-west across the pampas towards Patagonia, the Andean lakes and the border with Chile.

Location precision: The family's house isn't identified; the pin marks Miramar.

Visitor guidance: Miramar is a quiet family beach town on the Atlantic coast, south-west of Mar del Plata.

In Chile the overloaded motorcycle finally broke down for good, and the friends went on as hitchhikers, riding on trucks and relying on the hospitality of strangers. Granado later wrote that by the end they were "a pair of vagabonds with knapsacks on our backs, the dust of the road covering us". In the port of Valparaíso they tried to get a passage to Easter Island, a dream of both, but no boat would take them there, so they turned north into the copper-mining country of the desert.

Location precision: The pin marks central Valparaíso.

In the Atacama Desert they spent a cold night with a miner and his wife, communists on the run, who did not even own a blanket; Guevara called them "the shivering flesh-and-blood victims of capitalist exploitation". Then they visited Chuquicamata, the American-owned copper mine that was the main source of Chile's wealth. The working conditions angered him. Chuquicamata is still one of the largest open-pit mines in the world: a hole over 4 kilometres long and 850 metres deep beside the town of Calama.

Crossing into Peru at Tacna in March, they travelled up into the highlands, where Guevara was stunned by the poverty of rural areas and of the Indigenous farmers working small plots owned by wealthy landlords. In Cuzco and at Machu Picchu the Inca ruins moved him deeply, and he wondered how so advanced a civilisation had given way to the poverty around it. Granado talked of founding an Indian political party to start a new Túpac Amaru revolution.

Visitor guidance: Entry to Machu Picchu is by timed ticket, which must be booked in advance; most visitors come by train from Cuzco to Aguas Calientes.

Passing through Lima in May, they met Dr Hugo Pesce, head of Peru's national leprosy programme and a prominent Marxist. In June they reached the San Pablo colony on the Amazon, home to about 600 patients, with the doctors on one bank and the sick on the other. They worked there for some weeks; Guevara made a point of shaking patients' hands without gloves and playing football with them, and once swam across the river from the doctors' side to the patients'. They left on a raft, the Mambo-Tango, down the river to Leticia in Colombia.

Location precision: The colony's buildings have largely gone; the pin marks the area of San Pablo on the Amazon.

From Leticia they went on to Bogotá, where Guevara wrote to his mother on 6 July, and then to Caracas. There the friends separated. Granado took a job at the Cabo Blanco leprosarium near the coast and stayed in Venezuela. Guevara caught a cargo plane to Miami, where a fault stranded him for a month working as a waiter and dishwasher, then went home to Buenos Aires and finished his medical degree. The two did not meet again for eight years — by then Guevara was a hero of the Cuban Revolution.

Location precision: The pin marks central Caracas.