best way to get to know and to understand a country was by visiting hospitals and meeting the patients that they housed. He was not interested in the sites for tourists, and preferred meeting the people in custody of the police or the strangers that he met en route with whom he struck up a conversation. Guevara had seen the parallel existence of the poverty and deprivation faced by the native populations. Guevara also noted 'turbulence' in the region under the Río Grande, but having not actually crossed this river, Guevara, historian John Lee Anderson argues, used it as a symbol of the United States, and this was an early glimmer of the notion of neocolonial exploitation that would obsess him in later life. For the young Guevara, the trip had been an education. It was the success of his Argentinian "raid", as he put it, that awakened in him a desire to explore the world and prompted the commencing of new travel plans. Upon completion of his bicycle journey, El Gráfico, a sports magazine in Argentina, published a picture of Guevara on the motorbike he used for the journey. The company that manufactured the engine Ernesto had adapted to his bicycle tried to use it for advertising, claiming it was very strong since Guevara had gone on such a long tour using its power. While he continued studying, he also worked as a nurse on trading and petroleum ships of the Argentine national shipping-company. This allowed Guevara to travel from the south of Argentina to Brazil, Venezuela and Trinidad. Expedition In January 1952, Guevara's older friend, Alberto Granado, a biochemist, and Guevara, decided to take a year off from their medical studies to embark on a trip they had spoken of making for years: traversing South America on a motorcycle, which has metaphorically been compared to carbureted version of Don Quixote's Rocinante. Guevara and the 29-year-old Granado soon set off from Buenos Aires, Argentina, astride a 1939 Norton 500 cc motorcycle they named La Poderosa II ("The Mighty II") with the idea of eventually spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo Leper colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River. In total, the journey took Guevara through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and to Miami, before returning home to Buenos Aires. The trip was carried out in the face of some opposition by