I’ll take COUNTRIES NAMED FOR PEOPLE for $400 Alex

There are three of them in South America – one for Christopher Columbus (Colombia) and two for Simon Bolivar (Bolivia and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela)

As we learn about history we are drawn to the stories of great people and we develop a short list of our own heroes; complex characters who changed the world whilst dealing with their own demons. Growing up in the UK my history lessons focused on the people who put the greatness into Great Britain and my own two obsessions have been Lawrence of Arabia and Winston Churchill.

But I think that Simon Bolivar deserves to be on that list. His story is astonishing and complex and the opportunity for one person to achieve what he accomplished could only have happened in the early nineteenth century.

He was born into wealth and educated by his nurse, a family slave, and tutors. He traveled in Europe as a military cadet, witnessed the coronation of Napoleon at Notre Dame, and came home with a head full of ideas from the enlightenment. He put his life and money into leading a military liberation of a continent from Spain at the age of 25 and was appointed President of Venezuela (by age 30), Gran Colombia (present day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama), Bolivia, and Peru. His first wife died and he stayed true to his vow to marry nobody else but had a voracious appetite for women; some of whom appear to have been offered him by grateful citizens. He did have one constant lover, Manuela Saenz, who prevented an assassination attempt against him and was a collaborator to the point he called her “Libertadora del Libertador”.  His dream of a politically unified continent fell apart under the pressure and greed of the church and the local oligarchs who settled the borders of the current countries of South America. He died a broken man unwilling the leave the countries he had liberated and ruled.

Our ride so far has passed through a few of the key places in Bolivar’s story. We started in Cartagena where he died, passed through Ayacucho where the Spanish were finally defeated, and then to Cusco where the statue here celebrates his lap of honor in 1825 through many of the cities that revered him.

One book to get the flavour of his whole life is “The General and His Labyrinth” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that describes the last 30 days of his life as he left Bogota and his dreams behind and could not bring himself to step on the boat at Cartagena and accept exile.