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

I'm a critic for The New York Times,

“and on those of a podcast called Cannonball.”

We're going to talk about that song you can't get out of your head. That TV show you watched and can't stop thinking about and the movie that you saw when you were kid that made you who you are, whether you like it or not. I was so embarrassed the whole time because it's a bad film.

Yeah, and I still love it. You can find Cannonball on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily on Sunday.

Travel is an inescapably visual experience. The entire vocabulary we attached 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, we simply 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 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

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 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 to Gika Stan. I spent a month on the world's most remote in Habitat Island, which is in the South Atlantic. What's that called? Tristan Decuna.

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 any way on earth. To be able to look at a map and put your fingers

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. Richard, deeper layers of a fuller sense of place. Mm-hmm. And how did you try to answer that question? Well, I've tried it in different ways.

17 years ago I was in the Zurich

and I went to the world's first permanent dark restaurant

staff 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. Mm-hmm. 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 rabbioli. I think that just shows what happens when

we dim certain dominant senses and what that can open up and how that can enrich and experience. And so I think that goes to show just how much richer travel can be

To have the Chaco smells,

“the animal smells the best food for its smooth taste.”

You can hear a lot growing on this, 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 Travelize,

which takes this to another level. Explain that. It pairs visually impaired travelers with sighted travelers as equal companions. And it's whole premises 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.

“You're right, sighted folk just think about the sight”

and all the other things are just after thought. The company was founded by a man in the Marlotteve. He was raised in Glasgow and lost a sighted 18 due to Red Knight's pigmentosa. You know, walk up and a basically couldn't see

and I realized that this was it that I was blind and people all around me 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 down.

So the prisoner and 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 there so much about the world. And I learned that if you did to push your limits in your world becomes bigger. And then he became young professionally. And he had disposable income to do travel.

I had money to spend. I wanted to go and see the world. But when I approached mainstream tutor operators, all of them wouldn't let me book on their trip 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. I 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 them. But we'll just have sight to 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 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 it in one line as well.

And it gives them a different perspective and inspiration. I 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

the 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. What's on earth? One of us is a P.Cock which is one of those really long tails that is running across the road.

And we're going to hear all about this trip that you took the India right after the break. Some songs that I've written, I started on a piano that happened with all and with a Christmas view. If you couldn't tell, that is Mariah Carey. I'm John Caramonica, one of the critics behind the New York Times' 30 greatest living American Songwriters project.

who hasn't sat for a video like this in a long time.

These are not ordinary conversations.

“You're going to watch these videos and learn about intimate approaches to craft in ways that you rarely have access to.”

My mom got me this notebook and I was just writing it really small because I didn't want anybody to read what I was writing. Okay, Jay-Z's teenage notebooks. I need to see those. Watch all the video interviews for free and check out the entire 30 greatest living American Songwriters project at ny times.com/30gradest or in the app.

And let us know if you agree with our picks.

I bet you won't. 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 rich shows.

“People coming in to try to sell these 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. 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, we didn't have to be walking through that need.

This need is a walk for an entry which comes into some sort of magic change.

“And then you can't finish up one of those. Again, you're going to be guys in space.”

Yeah, you're in big old 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 are unremarkable things that you might ordinarily pass over. The black and white painted curves. 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. After Delhi, where did you all go next? From Delhi, we went to the Taj Mahal in Agra. The inner sanctum of this entry monument.

On that day, I was paired with a new visually impaired travel or VI as travelized calls. And his name was Luke. The stories I'm dealing with these textures. We make our way through security and we line up with all the other tourists, England, photographs. And I attempt to describe for Luke one of the most iconic visual pictures in the world.

Sunrise of the Taj Mahal. The reflective pools in front of us. It is a gorgeous white marble monument set against a ever-whiteening sky from the sunrise. 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 and the other.

And we walked the grounds. Let's walk a little forward here.

The ground is quite level.

This is all pure marble.

“I can tell this one's certainly my blossom tactile sort of fadeback with these footprints.”

It's really weird. That's, I think. 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.

I was trying to take this time and very seriously. I really felt as though Luke's impression of the Taj Mahal rested with how well I could describe this place. Right entirely in your hands. So I tried to rise to the occasion.

Luke, if you look, tilt your head up.

We're looking straight up at the facade of the Taj Mahal. So I'm going to put your hand on the facade of the building. Yeah. These are the inlayed precious stones that he was talking about. There's some differences.

There's been various quite velocity. I see that probably one thing. And it's green. Yeah, colors. We are now in the inner coaching the inner chamber of the tune.

Yeah, you can see this right. This is, you get a lot of that. I can't read the problem about that because voice is. Is that like your problem with saying saving? Yes, Bubba.

This is a faulted ceiling in this anti chamber. I've been over a threshold here. Luke. Ah, got it. These sounds increased.

This is really a second course.

I think we're not leaving. Yeah, they are killing us double tune too. Yeah, you get it somewhere, so you're in such speed. Yeah, I had somebody singing over to the, you know, so I'm into the right way for this. So now we're going to narrow a threshold.

Yeah. And where we came is a wooden surface that's kind of a boardwalk that they built over the marble flooring.

“And I think I was benefiting from moving slowly through the environment, the experience of guiding a blind travel or allowed me to slow down and to notice more.”

It allowed me to, to savor it in a way. And you feel the sun on your face as we pass by. Yeah. These are the kind of lattice marble. Let's just look at it.

And what we're looking at is the Yamuna River. Yeah. And it's just beautiful. Classic river that runs along the backside of the touch. What is it?

What do you sense at the, in front of us? It's wide open space. So it was running around when I found a house. It's a child wearing good jank bangles on her feet, on her around her ankle. Just turning it back around.

And now just bath in sun is the whiteness of the Taj Mahal. A set of against a blue sky. So the next day I was paired with someone named Candor.

“What is the specific nature of your visual impairment?”

At this point, I don't have any vision. I don't have frost that time. And Candor told me when I asked her what she wants descriptions of. She said, the whole site's thing doesn't really interest me. I'm more interested in hearing about the reality of India.

What it is, I like descriptions of the people like what they're doing. Even if it's not the most, you know, even if they're laying on a bench or something. That part I find has like more of an impact I guess them. You know, there's a tree over here with me all the leaves. So I peered out the window and I pointed out the grittier aspects of India.

The laundry fluttering outside of apartment buildings.

And Candor told me when the most vivid impressions of India that she had had.

Kind of interesting.

“This one kid, little kid, came up and patted my leg.”

And I reached out to see what it was and I felt, I don't know if it was a boy or girl. But their hand 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.

Like having rough, sort of rough hands. And I thought, how have they lived and 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 the humanity of this place.

“Like people are just real, like they really have real feelings and emotions and, you know, why you send it?”

Why do you want it, though? Just the whole. I thought I'd be going on together. 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 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 to me, I think of this well-known Hindu parable that one day, as we're crossing the Rajasthanu Desert, our tour director told us about six blind men who encounter elephant for first time.”

The first blind men get his hand on the side of the creature and elephant is moved and solid like a ball. 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. And they all argue each convinced that his perception is right. And the idea is that everyone experiences the world differently in no single viewpoint can capture the whole picture. And understanding other 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.

Just like the parable says, there was a moment in which I remember one of the VIP travelers at Taj Mahal described this own that he heard in the Masaliyam. The home, the generic home in the Taj Mahal, it has an own note and a pitch and home pitch, just for people talking to each other about the fair, his various things.

That most cited 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 cited 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.

This is a dial-founded travel.

Yeah.

“It's a bit like I would say that as a blind person, traveling is like almost like the book version.”

The blind travelers you told me, it's like reading a book. It's like the film version. It's more like watching a film and it'll be the book version, so it's better.

Cited 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 it.

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. Incent, people might be burning in or just what they're having for dinner. You can smell their version of dull compared to our version. The preparations were just the art.

20 feet, 30 feet.

“All the senses together build a cohesive image.”

Improving more elements than just sight because... It's almost like a race car because it's an engineer. There's so many strange things about how there's so many brushing or cleaning. Yeah, it's a guy removing the bird food. Andy?

Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Today's episode was produced by Alex Barron, with help from Luke Vanderplug. It was edited by Wendy Dorr. Our production manager is Franny Kartoth, and production assistants came from Dahlia Hadad.

This episode was engineered by Daniel Ramirez, and features original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lazzano. Special thanks to Alicia but E2, Diane Wang, and Alicia Hari Desani Gupta. That's it for the Daily On Sunday. I'm Michael Barron. See you tomorrow.