South American Adventures Of 1948

From Plastic Tub

A wild three-month fling which took Easton W. Wunderkidd from Tierra del Fuego to the Darien Gap.

In August, 1947, Wunderkidd was engaged by the German School of Re-Design in Costa Rica to teach for a year. His classes were a disaster: under-prepared and overwhelmed, he stammered and fudged his way though something which was an "inexcusable mess" in the terms of one disgruntled student. His contract was not extended.

Disgraced, Wunderkidd flew to Buenos Aires in May, 1948, at the height of southern hemisphere summer. His goal was to scour the town for an old German he'd heard about who was said to be Hitler's favorite cartographer and, incidentally, Yon Milhaus' uncle. One night, drunken, his Welsh host, a shepherd by the name of Gwyllyn Gwyllyn, also something of a local celebrity for his polyglot renderings of torch songs and his enormous capacity for drink, challenged the impressionable Wunderkidd to an improbable feat: visit every capital of South America in three months, without paying for a train, bus, taxi, airplane or any other means of transportation which would violate the spirit of the deal; terms were never really clarified; stakes were never even set. The only thing that is certain is that the 24-year old Wunderkidd was on the train the next day, an itinerant; his only provisions were those on his back.

His wallet was stolen the next day and he found himself pondering starvation in the middle of the wilderness where the benefactor he'd encountered hitching had dumped him after threatening to make him suck cock. Naturally, this is where the adventures began.

There were the nuns in Uruguay...

The bolo throwing contest in Cordoba...

The orgy in Rio...

The fistfight with a fugitive Nazi in Bolivia...

The cocaine fiasco in Bogota...

The piranha incident that cost him a finger...

An abominable case of dysentary....

It was a wild time he never got over. It was on this trip, for example, that Wunderkidd was arrested for having sex with a watermelon in Montemierda, Venezuela. Though reluctantly admitted by many to be "ingenious, if fiendish," his scholarly work arising from the trip further alienated him from his academic colleagues and all but sank him as a professor. His travel journals, however, are a masterpiece of comic misery not to be missed.

Wunderkidd, defying all expectations, met the challenge. Almost twenty-four hours before his deadline he crossed over into Costa Rica, having passed through Bogota some days before. Gwyllyn, suitably impressed, gave Wunderkidd a set of diamond cufflinks shaped like dice and a cabin in Patagonia. Wunderkidd sold both, hitchhiked to New York City and lived painting esoteric canvasses and sunbathing nude on his roof. He later moved to Sarasota, Florida, where he died in 1997 after writing his most famous biographical and cartographical work.

Jorge Suarez claimed that Che Guevara's famous motorcycle trip through Latin America, suggested by friend Alberto Granado, was in fact inspired by Wunderkidd's audacious journey in the year Guevara began medical school. Guevara, incidentally, made his journey in 1951, the same year Wunderkidd had his gall bladder removed by Dr. Ernesto Gazzara after a minor motorcycle accident.

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