While my trip to La Paz and Titicaca was officially to get a new visa, and to see a little more of this country that i am claiming to be something of an authority on, there was also another motive. My very short rotation of t-shirts was becoming tedious in the extreme, not to mention unhygienic; i needed more clothing, and not just clothing, but clothing that said something

Before i had left Sucre , i had a feeling that i knew what t-shirt i wanted. It took a while to be able to admit to myself that it was so, but of the limited options available in Bolivian markets, what i most wanted was a Che Guevara tee.

For those who have known me longer, you might recall that in 1998 i had augmented my wardrobe of heavy metal shirts with a Che tee. This posed a problem; could i really regress a decade to my fifteen year old taste in fashion?

And more crucially, now that i have given up on my rather adolescent notions of communist revolutions, and actually know something both of Guevara’s life, and of the type of people who long after puberty has finished still wear Che t-shirts, i had to ask myself; would wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt make me a wanker?

And would people who took me for a wanker in a Che tee really wait around long enough for me to explain that i wasn’t wearing it out of solidarity with the last dregs of world communism, or because i thought war or berets were cool, but because i liked the iconic image, and the story behind the image much more than the man himself. or rather what the man had become. Could i support Che the writer and traveller, or Che the doctor, without supporting Che the gun-toting murder advocate?

Would people let me explain, and would it make sense if i said that i’d rather wear a tee showing Gael Garcia Bernal as Che Guevara?

And would i be less of a wanker if i explained that it seems somehow more acceptable to wear a Che tee that has come from Bolivia, given that Bolivia’s relationship to Che is an ambivalent one. Bolivia, after all, killed Che Guevara, but Bolivia (or certain portions of Bolivia) also idolises him and still invokes him as a hero, saint and saviour today.

It is a difficult question, and one i am yet to find a satisfactory answer to. I think wearing a Che tee in Bolivia is not intrinsically wanky, but if me and my Che shirt should return to Australia, or somewhere else, who knows what we might become?