Tuesday 31 July 2012

Road through Time, or Roads in Time: World Heritage Site and My New Book Project

Now that I've put aside the short story collection Desire Lines: A Geography of Love that I've been working for the last several months, I'm back to working on the next non-fiction book.  It's called Road through Time, and may end up being a reflection both on time and the permanence of roads aas legacies of what humans do to the world. 

So I was delighted to see two interesting stories in  Le Devoir this week about roads, history and memory.  They have their starting point in a conference held earlier this month at Université Laval in Quebec City called Tourism, Roads and Cultural Itineraries: Meaning, Memory and Development.  More than 300 particpants from around the world gave presentations in English, French and Spanish about  cultural treasures that lend themselves to what might be truly called "Road Trips."

One of the most interesting series of talks was about the Inca Road through the Andes.  More than 6,000 km long, it traverses the spine of South America from Ecuador to Argentina, and still is in use.

Don't know just where this is going to lead me. To South America, maybe?


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