Sites Unseen: What’s Revealed by Traveling With the Blind

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. Travel is an inescapably visual experience. The entire vocabulary we attach to travel confirms that. We go sightseeing. We ask for rooms with a view. We memorialize our trip where we brag about it by posting photographs on social media. But my colleague Andy Isaacson, an accomplished photographer and writer, recently took a trip with a group of blind travelers that directly challenged the idea that we best understand the world through our eyes. Today, Andy talks to us about that trip and about the deeper layers of experience that are revealed by travelers who cannot see. It's Sunday, May 24. Andy Isaacson, welcome to The Daily. Thanks so much. You have traveled all over the world for your work. You've reported four times from every continent on earth. And I have to say, that sounds like the most romantic job in the universe. Do you hear that all the time? I hear a dream job. It certainly was my dream job. Was it? Yeah. I was the kid that collected National Geographic magazines and books about wildlife and world history. And I think once I got into journalism, a lot of my career was driven by a desire to see the world to lay eyes on these places. Can you give us a brief rundown of some of the places you've been in that fully realized dream job career? I've been to the South Pole. I've been a few clicks shy of the North Pole. I've been across Tajikistan. I spent a month on the world's most remote inhabit in Ireland, which is in the South Atlantic. What's that called? Tristan DeKuna. You've been around. Yeah. And I think I just always wanted to create in my mind's eye a visual map of the world. I wanted to go to these places. I wanted to see them with their eyes and be able to visualize anywhere on earth. To be able to look at a map and put your fingers in and see it because you had seen it. And that's what I think drove a lot of my traveling life was to be able to fill in the dark spots on the map with pictures. For years, I would return from a trip abroad and a friend of mine would ask me, "What did it smell like?" And I always fumbled for a meaningful answer. And it made me wonder what kind of deeper layers of experience I was missing. To what degree was I, was my sight so dominating my experience that it was leaving out richer, deeper layers of a fuller sense of place? And how did you try to answer that question? Well, I've tried it in different ways. 17 years ago, I was in Zurich and I went to the world's first permanent dark restaurant, staffed by blind and visually impaired people. You have to put away all your equipment in a locker and then the staff member comes out who's blind. You put your hands on his or her shoulder, they lead you into the restaurant. And I still remember 17 years later, the sound of the room. I remember the taste of the tomato sauce. I remember how it felt when I stabbed my face with the ravioli. I think that just shows what happens when we dim certain dominant senses and what that can open up and how that can enrich an experience. And so I think that goes to show just how much richer travel can be when you activate other senses. To have the charcoal smells, the animal smells, it's really great for it. You can hear a lot growing on, there's a lot of chaos, a lot of different things happening in all different directions. So that idea was kicking around in my head for a while and some years later, I learned about this company called Travel Eyes, which takes this to another level. Explain that. It pairs visually impaired travelers with sighted travelers as equal companions. And its whole premise is that blind travelers can bring a perspective that deepens the experience. Then sighted people can also provide details, descriptions, and help with navigation. And together they could have a deeper richer travel experience. The company was founded by a man named Marla Tief who was raised in Glasgow and lost his sight at 18 due to retnight as pigmentosa. You know, I woke up and I basically couldn't see and I realized that this was it, that I was now blind and people all around me kept saying that I couldn't do this and I couldn't do that. And at the beginning I was believing it and it was getting really daverned, so I was a prisoner in my own head. He didn't want to live with those limits, so he pushed himself to travel. He went to Canada for a school and that's where the travel bug bit him. That was the most amazing year of my life and I learned so much about the world. And I learned that if you did push your limits, you know, your world becomes bigger. Then he became young professionally, finally had disposable income to do travel. I had money to spend, I wanted to go and see the world, but when I approached mainstream total operators, all of them wouldn't let me book on their proof holidays. Mainstream travel companies rejected him. They didn't want him to be on their trips without a caregiver, and they excluded him from more adventurous activities like hiking and skiing, and so we decided to create something new. That came up with the concept of, well, we'll just have sighted travelers come along, they'll be customers as well, they're not going to be. Travelized was a company that would allow blind travelers and sighted travelers to travel together as equal companions, not as clients and helpers, but as code travelers, so that both could experience the world more fully. So the idea is that this makes for a better travel experience for both of these groups. It wouldn't be a charity, it would be a kind of cross-pollination of travel experiences. Yeah, in providing a multi-sensory travel experience, which could benefit obviously the visually impaired travelers, it would also engage all five senses of the sighted travelers and in turn provide a deeper, richer travel experience for them. I'd reached a point in my traveling life in which I was less interested in traveling to a new place, but traveling to a place differently, and travelized off for the promise of, that, it offered the promise of a new, different, more immersive way of experiencing a travel destination. So I flipped the catalog and I saw that they had a trip to India and I thought, what better place to experience this form of travel than the most multi-sensory place on earth. In front of us is a PCOT, which was one of those really long tails that was running across the road. And we're going to hear all about this trip that you took to India right after the break. Andy, what are we listening to here? This is the Cacapini of Old Delhi. We're moving through Old Delhi. We're navigating an even pavement. We're dodging rickshaws, people coming in to try to sell us things, cows walking along the sidewalk. And I'm moving through this environment with a visually impaired man named Daniel gently holding my elbow. My role is to guide him safely around the streets of Delhi and describe to him the visual details I see to give him a picture of what we're passing through. Daniel, meanwhile, is interpreting India through his own sensory experience. What I noticed as I was describing his visual details is I was focusing on those sort of prosaic elements that quietly define a place. These are unremarkable things that you might ordinarily pass over. The black and white painted curbs. The way that roadside vendors displayed their potato chip bags over the front of their stands like colored beads, the neat lane lines that were universally ignored. It was sharpening my noticing and as I was describing these visual details, I was gaining a more vivid impression of India myself. After Delhi, where did you all go next? From Delhi, we went to the Taj Mahal in Agra. So now we're in the inner sanctum of this entry monument. In that day, I was paired with a new visually impaired travel or V.I. as travel eyes calls them. His name was Luke. The floor is undulating. We make our way through security and we line up with all the other tourists angling photographs. When I attempt to describe for Luke, one of the most iconic visual pictures in the world, sunrise at the Taj Mahal. The reflective pool is in front of us. It is a gorgeous white marble monument set against a ever whitening sky from the sunrise. It has Luke asked me to take photos of him with his GoPro camera. And then he held my arm gently, my elbow with one hand and his cane the other and we walked the grounds. Let's walk a little forward here and we're going to take a step down right here. The ground is quite level. This is all pure marble. I can tell this but I'm certainly if I've lost some tact, I'll sort of feed back with these foot covers off. It's really weird. I'm looking at a sign that says don't go neared monkeys, don't make direct eye contact with monkeys, don't tease or irritate monkeys. I was trying to take the assignment very seriously. I really felt as though Luke's impression of the Taj Mahal rested with how well I could describe this place. Rise entirely in your hands. So I tried to rise to the occasion. Luke, if you look, tilt your head up, we are looking straight up at the facade of Taj Mahal. So I'm going to put your hand on the facade of the building. These are the inlaid precious stones that he was talking about. There's some differences. For example, this bit here is quite glossary. I assume that's probably one of the inlaid stones. And it's green. Yeah, colors. We are now in the inner, approaching the sort of inner chamber of the tomb. Yeah, you need this straight. This is, you get a lot of echo, reverb from these voices. Is that like your vaulting ceiling? Yes. Bubba is a vaulted ceiling in this anti-chamber. I've been over a threshold here at Luke. Ah, these sounds increased. This is very succulent. Chorus. Carnalid. Now, in the inner most chamber of the Taj Mahal, yeah, they are carrying us a double chamber. Yeah, you get in somewhere so you're in some sort of speaker. Yeah, I had somebody singing over to the right way front of the site. So now we're going to a narrow threshold from where we came. This is a wooden surface that's kind of a boardwalk that they've built over the marble flooring. And I think I was benefiting from moving slowly through the environment. The experience of guiding a blind traveler allowed me to slow down and to notice more. It allowed me to saber it in a way. Can you feel the sun on your face as we pass by? Yeah. These are the kind of lattice, marble, which we're looking at. And what we're looking at is the Yamuna River, which is a beautiful, placid river that runs along the backside of the Taj. What are you sense in front of us? It was quite open, so it was running around, when I was a child. That's a child wearing bangles on her feet, on her round her ankles, just turning it back around and now just bathing sun is the whiteness of the Taj Mahal set up against a blue sky. So the next day I was paired with someone named Candy. What is the specific nature of your visual impairment? At this point, I don't have any vision, I don't have a head prosthetic eye. And Candy told me, when I asked her what she wants descriptions of, she said, "The whole sight's thing doesn't really interest me. I'm more interested in hearing about the reality of India." I like descriptions of the people, like what they're doing, even if it's not the most. Even if they're laying on a bench or something, that part I find has more of an impact, I guess them. You know, there's a tree over here with yellow leaves. So I paired out the window and I pointed out the grittier aspects of India. The laundry fluttering outside of apartment buildings and the men on the side of the road threading marigold garlings for temples. And Candy told me one of the most vivid impressions of India that she had had. Kind of interesting. This little kid came up and like padded my leg and I reached out to see what it was and I felt, I don't know if it was a boy or a girl, but their hand and it was just really rough, like the skin was rough. And sometimes you would think, you know, children tend to have softer skin and softer hands. And this was, I just thought about, you know, a child having rough, sort of rough hands. And I thought, how have they lived and what have, what's made their hands so rough? Like, what have they been through? I was really struck by that. It felt very profound to me that this portal, this doorway into India for her was crossed by this moment of touch. In that moment, she was totally transported into. through the humanity of this place. - Like people are just real. Like they really have real feelings and emotions and, you know, lives and just a whole bottle - Now that you're home from India, I really wanna understand how you process this entire experience. But first, we're gonna take a very quick break. So, Andy, when this trip to India was over and as a journalist, inevitably you sat down to make sense of it all and write about it, what did you come to understand? - That no single viewpoint, no single impression of a place captures the full picture. And it made me think of this well-known Hindu parable that one day as we're crossing the Rajasthani Desert, our tour director told us about six blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time. - The first blind man kept his hand on the side of the creature and elephant is smooth and solid like a ball. He said. - And they each touch a different body part. One touches its trunk and imagines a snake. One touches the floppy ear and describes an elephant as like a flying carpet. - The third blind man touched the elephant's point at us. I was right, he decided. - An elephant is sharp as a spear. - And they all argue each convinced that his perception is right. - Okay, each of you touched only one part. Perhaps you all will put the parts together. You will see that truth. Now let me take that. - And the idea is that everyone experiences the world differently and no single viewpoint can capture the whole picture. - Right. - And understanding others' perspectives is part of seeing the fuller truth. - Experiencing India alongside of the visually impaired travelers and having them describe their perceptions gave me a fuller picture of India. - Mm-hmm. - Just like the parable says. There was a moment in which I remember one of the vi travelers at the Taj Mahal described this om that he heard in the mazaliyam. - That the hum, the generic hum in the Taj Mahal, it has a like an om note, a pitch and om pitch just for people talking to each other about the fear of various things. - And he said most sighted tourists would probably never have experienced that aspect of the Taj Mahal. They would have never really heard the resonance of that chamber. Because they're too busy taking photographs. - I wonder how you think this will change how you travel in the future. - As a sighted person and so visually dominant, I don't imagine that I'll be able to dim that sense, but I think it certainly gave me a new and deeper appreciation for turning on my other senses, moments in which I could feel what is the texture of the air. It reminds me of something that Amar Lethif once told me about the difference between how blind and sighted people experience travel. - This is the guy who founded Travelers. - Yeah. - It's a bit like, I would say that as a blind person, traveling is like almost like the book version. - For blind travelers, you told me it's like reading a book. You know, because you're imagining things and you don't want to hand. So you get these descriptions and then you're imagining them. - For sighted travelers. - It's like, you know, the film version. - It's more like watching a film. - Watching the film and it'll be the book version, so it's better. - Sighted people tend to rely on immediate visual cues, architecture, color, landscape. It's all rendered for them like a movie on a screen. For blind travelers, they experience a place in a more interpretive way. It's a more interpretive process in which descriptions feed imagination. The world reveals itself more slowly through these layers of sound and touch and scent, spatial awareness. And that's what builds the impression of a place. - That's me. - I'll always have more of that film version of a place. - Right, how could you not? - But I think this experience gave me the tools to unlock more of that book version. - The incense that people might be burning or just what they're having for dinner. You can smell the air version of Dahl compared to our version. The preparations with just the art is 20, 30. All the senses together build a cohesive image, comprising more elements in just sight. Because. It's almost like a race car because of the engineer. - It's so exciting over there as if somebody's brushing or cleaning something. - Yeah, it's a guy removing the bird poop. - Ah, ha, ha. - Andy, thank you very much, paper shit. - Thank you, Michael. - Today's episode was produced by Alex Barron with help from Luke Vanderplug. It was edited by Wendy Dore. Our production manager is Franny Khartoth and production assistants came from Dahlia Hadad. This episode was engineered by Daniel Ramirez and features original music by Dan Powell and Mary and Lazano. Special thanks to Alicia but YouTube, Diane Wong and Alicia Hari Desani Gupta. That's it for the daily on Sunday. I'm Michael Barron. See you tomorrow. (soft music)