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Home > Che Guevara and the Mountain of Silver: By Bicycle and Train through South America
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Che Guevara and the Mountain of Silver: By Bicycle and Train through South America
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By Anne Mustoe
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 (2 Reviews)
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List Price: $18.95
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Publisher:
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Virgin Books
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Edition:
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1st
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Date:
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December 31, 1969 |
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Binding:
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Paperback
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Pages:
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256
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Intrepid ex-headmistress Anne Mustoe dusts off the bicycle clips once more and embarks on a remarkable journey through South America. Following in the bike tracks of Che Guevara, Anne retraces the route this iconic revolutionary figure once tread, as documented in Motorcycle Diaries. A second route takes her to Potosi, the highest city in the world, as she travels to the Mountain of Silver. Beautifully written and wonderfully evocative, this travelogue charts an epic journey by bike and train through South America's most colorful and historically interesting areas.
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Customers' Reviews:
Add Your Own Review |
Disappointing, April 4, 2008
By A. Dirkse (Boulder, CO USA)
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This book was a serious disappointment to me. First, the book is not about cycling. Nor does she venture within a thousand km of Torres del Paine National Park, which is featured on the front and back covers. While the bike makes occasional appearances in the first 60 pages of the book, it is usually on a bus or in a truck as the weather was less-than-perfect, there was wind, or the roads had potholes. The author initially places the blame for this on her desire to cover more ground with her traveling companion, who leaves South America early a few pages later for a lack of cycling! From that point the author scraps the bike journey entirely and instead travels by bus, train and taxi with her unwieldy luggage including a wheeled suitcase. She somehow spends a year between Santiago and Potosi, Bolivia, then wastes the final half of the book talking about all of the things she didn't have time to do in her final weeks because she is needed on a lecture tour and has a book deadline.
"Now I had a contract to finish a book and a string of lectures to give in the New Year, so I had to travel with an eye on the calendar and get home in good time. It seemed to be one of life's ironies that my original escape to travel had turned into a travel career, which was now interfering with my freedom to travel!"
I might add that it is apparently interfering with her ability to write a decent travel book as well. This book is mostly a collection of her prejudices and dislikes, her awkwardly expressed feminist stance and poorly rendered, often patently false, rambling prose on the history and geography of the region. The book jumps from topic to topic without any predictability apart from the fact that it surely won't be about anything expressed on the cover. The summary on the back of the book tells of how she "witnesses the funeral of Augusto Pinochet" but she watched it on TV!
Throughout the book she whines about the young travelers and locals she encounters alike. How one guy in a hostel uses the computer too much and cooks in the hostel instead of going out (whereas she makes a habit of eating rich, often imported foods and staying in 5 star hotels) or that a guy that sits next to her on a long bus ride and has the audacity to eat greasy, smelly empanadas. One gets the feeling that she is new to South American bus travel... It is apparent from the book that the only people she connects with are those that have read and admired her previous books and treat her as the sort of demi-celebrity she believes herself to be.
Her disdain for Bolivia and blanket statements about that country are unbelievable, especially from a woman who spent only a couple of weeks visiting a very small section of that country. She doesn't bother to visit the train graveyard in Uyuni, to cycle (or even properly see) the salt flats, to visit the mines in Potosi. Not to mention the rest of Bolivia. Instead she stays in luxurious hotels that do not give a hint of the local flavor and whines that no one is available to cook her Christmas dinner. She doesn't bother to get the full picture before she ineptly delves into a discussion of Bolivian politics that looks at things from one side only, and inconsistently at that.
The Che aspects of the book are troubling as well. She interleaves her story with his for the first part of the book, repeating the same quotes of his with disdain time and time again. That he willingly ate food or accepted lodging from the poor. That he didn't want to stay in hotels though he could afford to. But one gets the sense that he got a much better picture of the land and the people than she did paying top dollar in her luxury lodging and avoiding interaction with the local population.
She cares for North Americans even less and evenly applies her stereotypes to all North Americans she knowingly encounters. She is very pro-British, tough, to the point of arguing with and insulting a drunk Chilean who insinuated that the Queen drank gin. She also uses the term 'Indian' which, aside from being offensive to a lot of indigenous people in the Americas is confusing when she also discusses her previous cycling trips through India.
The author would do well to get back on her bike and take the time to write a decent book and to give it a good edit. This book is filled with embarrassing misspellings, inaccuracies and a laughably naive and sheltered view of the places she visits.
This book is a waste of your time and money.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful
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An Englishwoman complains about the weather, March 16, 2010
By Chakriya Bowman (Australia)
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This book should have been fascinating. Instead it made drying paint seem like a fast moving and exciting spectator sport.
I knew we had problems when the book opened with an encounter at the airport. A worker there comments on her "famous" bicycle, an anecdote that was both self-serving and irrelevant to the story. Ms Mustoe then proceeds to validate every Australian's stereotype of the whinging Pom (read "whining Limey" for those in the US) by spending most of the book complaining about the weather.
Great slabs of the book seem to have been lifted from a couple of biographies of Che Guevara, and not in a particularly interesting or informative way. They sit out in space, and fail as an aside as there is no real attempt to work them into the journey of the author, other than as the sort of information that might be provided at a historical site. We then got a few potted prejudices, mostly focused on Che's sex life, and a very British degree of fascination with his dog. I decided fairly early on that really I'd rather read the biography than Ms Mustoe's beige-coloured summaries.
I believe there was some scenery she passed in there somewhere, and I believe she did meet a few locals of non-European origin, although the encounter I recall best, documented in an overly substantive number of paragraphs, was with a German-speaking woman and seemed to revolve around a longing for some mythical Weimar empire in South America.
At this point, I checked the publication date. I had decided that this book must have been written by a 1950s school teacher / spinster type, and perhaps was a reflection of an outdated time and place. But no such excuse could be made, as the trip definitely happened this century (from memory, I think it was 2003).
I decided my time was worth more than the cover price - so I said Auf Wiedersehen to Ms Mustoe and her German-speaking friend and bequeathed the book to the local book exchange, where I figure the sale price will be somewhat more commensurate with the quality of the writing.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
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