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

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. 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, or 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 travel. And about the deeper layers of experience that are revealed by travelers who cannot see. It's Sunday, May 24th. 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. Yeah. And I have to say, that sounds like the most important thing I've ever heard. That sounds like the most romantic job in the universe. Do you hear that all the time? I hear 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 real world? 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 inhabited island, which is in the South Atlantic. What's that called? Tristan da Cunha. 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 my eyes and be able to visualize anywhere on Earth. To like be able to look at a map and put your finger somewhere 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 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 and and and how that can enrich an experience. And so I think that. It goes to show just how much richer travel can be when you activate other senses. To have the charcoal smells, the the the animal smells. And that's really the core is moving. You can hear a lot going on. There's a lot of chaos, a lot of different things happening in all different directions. So that idea was kicking around. And my head for a while and some years later, I learned about this company called Travelize, 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 and descriptions and help with navigation. And together, they could have a deeper, richer travel experience. You're right, sighted folk just think about the site and all the other things are just afterthought. The company was founded by a man named Ammar Lateef. He was raised in Glasgow and lost his sight at 18 due to retinitis 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 me really down. 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 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 dare to push your limits, you know, your world, it becomes bigger. Then he became a young professional. He 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 tour operators, all of them wouldn't let me book on their group holidays. Mainstream travel companies rejected him. They didn't want him to be on their trips without a caregiver. And they excluded him. So they excluded him from more adventurous activities like hiking and skiing. I was living in Paris and I wanted to have that independent experience when I didn't have to rely on my friends and family. And so we decided to create something new. So I 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. Travelize was a company that would allow blind travelers and sighted travelers to travel together as equal companions. Not as clients and helpers, but as co-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. And then it makes them think about their own life as well. And it gives them a different perspective. It gives them inspiration. 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 Travelize offered the privilege, offered the promise of that. It offered the promise of a new, different, more immersive way of experiencing a travel destination. So I flipped through 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? One of us is a peacock with one of those, like, really long tails that's running across the road. It's. 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 cacophony of Old Delhi. We're moving through Old Delhi. We're navigating uneven pavement. We're dodging rickshaws. People coming in to try to save us. We're in a place where we can't even see the people. Cows walking along the sidewalk. horns. 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. It's at the end of a long kind of sort of plaza with a reflective pool. Daniel, meanwhile, is interpreting India through his own sensory experience. Yeah, I mean, for us, for visually impaired people, you'd be walking through that, and you'd perceive you just walk through an entrance, you'd come into some sort of anti-chamber, and then you'd come through another one, and then, again, you're in a big open space. Yeah, you're in a big open space. And what I noticed as I was describing these visual details is I was focusing on those sort of prosaic elements that quietly define a place. Those 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. Okay, so now we're in this, the inner sanctum of the, of this entry monument. On that day, I was paired with a new visually impaired traveler, or VI, as Travelize calls them. And his name was Luke. The floor is, um, undulated. Uh, his texture is, um, smoothish, but not, um. We make our way through security, and we line up with all the other tourists angling for photographs. See what you can do. And I attempt to describe for Luke one of the most iconic visual pictures in the world. Mm-hmm. Sunrise at the Taj Mahal. Maybe a thousand meters. 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. Mm-hmm. Do you, uh, frame that for me? Yeah. 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 gonna take a step down right here. Quite a steep step. Yep. The ground is, um, quite level. This is all pure marble. I can tell it's. I'm certainly. I've lost some tactile sort of feedback with these foot coverings on. It's really weird. Bags, I think. They're up in, I believe. I'm looking at a sign that says, don't go near monkeys, don't make direct eye contact with monkeys, don't tease or irritate monkeys, and don't take. 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. Right, it's entirely in your hands. So I tried to rise to the occasion. Luke, Luke, if you look, tilt your head up, we are looking straight up at the facade of Taj Mahal. So I'm gonna 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 glossy. I assume that's, um, probably one of the, uh, inlaid stones. And it's green. Yeah, colours. We are now in the inner, approaching the sort of inner chamber of the tomb. Yeah, this is very, this is, um, you get a lot of, uh, echo reverb from, uh, people's voices. Um, is that, like, your vaulted ceiling? Yes, above us is a vaulted ceiling Yeah. in this ante-chamber. Up and over a threshold here, Luke. Ah, I think the sound has increased, uh, this is really, uh, it's like a chorus. We're now in the innermost chamber of the Taj Mahal. Yeah, the, the echo is, uh, doubled or tripled. Yeah, you get, you get, it's almost like you're inside a speaker. Yeah, I heard somebody singing, uh, over to the, uh, the front, sort of over to the right, the way in front of the tent. So now we're gonna, now we're going through a narrow, uh, threshold. Yeah. From where we came. This is a wooden surface that's kind of a boardwalk that they've built over the marble, uh, flooring. Yeah. 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, to, to savor it in a way. Can you feel the sun on your face as we pass by? Yeah. These are the kind of latticed marble. What's this we're looking at here? What, what we're looking at is the Yamuna River. Yeah. It's this beautiful, um, placid river that runs along the backside of the Taj. What does it feel, how, what do you sense having, in front of us? It's wide open, so it's, so it's running around with the bells. It's a child wearing, um, um, bangles on her, on her feet, on her, around her ankles. Yeah. Just turning it back around. Yeah. And now, just bathed in 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, what is the specific, like, nature of your visual impairment? Um, for me, at this point I don't have any vision. Um, I had prosthetic eyes. Mm-hmm. So. Um, and Candy told me, when I asked her what, what she wants to describe. Yeah. What she wants to describe is descriptions of, she said, "The whole sights thing doesn't really interest me." Hmm. I'm more interested in hearing about the reality of India. Depending on what it is. I like descriptions of the people, like, what they're doing. Yeah. Even if it's not the most, you know, even if they're, like, laying on a bench or something. That part, I find, you know, has, like, more of an impact, I guess, than, um, you know, there's a tree over here. Yeah. And there's, like, yellow leaves, and. So I peered out the window, and I pointed out the grittier aspects of, of India. Um, 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. Well, kind of interesting, this one kid, little kid, came up and, like, patted my leg. And I reached out, um, to see what it was, and I felt, I'm, I don't know if it was a boy or a girl, but their hand, 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. So I just thought about, you know, a child, like, having rough, such rough hands. Mm. 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. Hmm. In that moment, she was totally transported into. the humanity of this place. Like, people are just real. Like, they're real, they have real feelings and emotions and, you know, lives and. Just the whole. Now that you're home from India, I really want to understand how you process this entire experience. But first, we're going to 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, 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. An elephant is smooth and solid like a wall. 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 pointed tusk. I was right, he decided. An elephant is sharp as a spear. And they all argue, each convinced that his perception is right. Each of you touched only one part. Perhaps you all will put the parts together. You will see the truth. 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, traveling 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 mausoleum. The hum, the generic hum in the Taj Mahal, it has like an "Om". It's like a note, a pitch, an "Om" pitch just for people talking to each other about the various, 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 about this. 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. Mm-hmm. It reminds me of something that Ammar Lateef, once told me about the difference between how blind and sighted people experience travel. This is the guy who founded Travelize. 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, he told me it's like reading a book. You know, because you're imagining things in your own head. So you get these descriptions and then you're imagining them. For sighted travelers. It's like, you know, the book version, the film version. It's more like watching a film. Watching the film. Mm-hmm. You know, maybe the book version sometimes is 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. Mm-hmm. For blind travelers, they experience a place in a more interpretive way. It's a more interpretive process in which descriptions feed imagination. Mm-hmm. 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. Fascinating. 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 their version of Dahl compared to our version. The preparations would suggest the arch is perhaps 20 feet up, 30, it's a bit high. All the sensors together build a cohesive image, comprising more elements than just sight because-- I do like riding in that. Yeah, on the street, I mean, I saw every bomb and every-- It's almost like a race car because of the engineering. Yeah, there's something scraping over there, as if somebody's brushing or cleaning something. Yeah, it's a guy removing the bird poop. Oh, ha, ha. It's scraping over there. Andy, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. Today's episode was produced by Alex Barron, with help from Luke Van Der Ploeg. It was edited by Wendy Dorr. Our production manager is Franny Carr-Toth, and production assistance came from Dahlia Haddad. This episode was engineered by Daniel Ramirez and features original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Special thanks to Alishaba Itub, Dianne Wong, and Alisha Haridassani Gupta. That's it. That's it for The Daily on Sunday. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.