Sightseeing for blind people
Travel can be daunting if you have a visual impairment. But Traveleyes
organises group holidays for blind and sighted people that are
liberating, fun, and yes, eye-opening, too
Jon Henley guardian.co.uk, Article history About this articleClose
Sightseeing for blind peopleThis article was published on
guardian.co.uk at 19.59 BST on Thursday 30 June 2011. A version
appeared on p4 of the G2 section of the Guardian on Friday 1 July
2011. It was last modified at 00.05 BST on Friday 1 July 2011.
The Traveleyes tour group visits a lemon grove in Sorrento.
So we're standing in the street outside the brothel – or what used to
be the brothel – in Pompeii. The one with the rude frescoes on the
walls showing ancient Roman punters exactly what they could expect for
their sesterces.
There are 20 of us, or thereabouts, and before we go in the man in the
white cheesecloth shirt and the floppy sun hat would like a word.
"Ladies and gentlemen, our sighted guides," says Amar Latif. "I'd just
like to remind you of my words at the beginning of this holiday. You
are not carers; you are fellow travellers, companions. And one of the
most valuable things you can do is to describe in loving detail
whatever you might see before you that is of visual interest. Here's
your chance."
And so it is that Maggie Heraty, a jolly humanitarian logistics expert
more used to organising emergency relief operations in Liberia or
Haiti, finds herself explaining to Jenny Tween, who works at the BBC
and has optic atrophy, meaning she has been partially sighted since
she was two, that here we have: "a gentleman, reclining. With a naked
lady squatting on top."
While over here, Maggie continues, undaunted by Jenny's snorts, we can
see (or not, of course) "the doggy position. And just along from that,
the lady's on top of the gentleman, again. But facing his feet this
time. Hmmm." She pauses. "Sorry, Jenny. Just trying to work out the
mechanics of that one. I don't think I've ever tried it."
It's not, obviously, that these people spend their holiday discussing
the sex lives of the Ancients. (Some delicate souls, for one thing,
simply won't. "I'll never forget my sighted companion in India," says
Judy Taylor, from Duffield in Derbyshire. "She refused point blank
even to try and describe the erotic sculptures. Said I was a decent
lady and wouldn't want to hear about that kind of thing, so why didn't
we just go and have a cup of tea.")
But nor are they your regular holidaymakers. Half of them, for a
start, are blind or visually impaired. The other half are fully
sighted. The former have paid a bit more than they might do for a
standard package holiday to come on this week-long break in Sorrento,
southern Italy, including flights, transfers, half-board in a
four-star hotel with pool, a cookery lesson and excursions to Pompeii,
Capri and Positano.
The latter have paid quite a bit less. In exchange, every day they
will take a different visually impaired traveller by the arm (not
literally, there's nothing a blind or partially sighted person – or
"VI", as they're more familiarly known – loathes more than being
patronised) and act as their guide. Show them, as it were, the sights.
Sighted travellers help VIs with obvious obstacles: kerbs, low arches
and doorways, busy roads, flights of stairs ("Step down. One more to
go. That's the bottom.") They explain where the food is on a plate
("Chicken at three o'clock, peas at six"). And once in a while, they
get to describe in loving detail the wall paintings in the Pompeii
brothel.
It's not hard. In fact it's fun. You learn a lot. "You get to do
things you wouldn't normally do," says Wendy Coley from Loughborough,
a sighted veteran of many such expeditions. "Once, in China, they got
to touch the terracotta warriors. Imagine. And the act of describing
what you see . . . You take in far more, somehow; see things in a very
different way. It may sound silly, but going on holiday with blind
people opens your eyes."
It does. I tried it at Gatwick with Latif, the 36-year-old
Glasgow-born entrepreneur who set up this strangely inspiring business
seven years ago. Amar has been without 95% of his sight since his
first year at university, thanks to an incurable eye condition called
retinitis pigmentosa. He founded Traveleyes, as the company is called,
because "no one was doing the kind of holiday I wanted to go on", and
as far as he knows it's the only one of its kind in the world.
Traveleyes founder Amar Latif organised his first group holiday in
2004. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian An airport, you very
quickly realise, is not a great place to be VI. Inexpertly piloted
baggage trolleys, beeping electric buggies, non-speaking departure
boards, too many people in too much of a hurry; a nightmare. And if
you ask for help, Latif says, they "put you in a wheelchair. Blind
people go mental. It's a liability avoidance thing, but it's so
humiliating. Most of us are highly independent, and extremely
competent. We don't need wheelchairs."
Technology has made life easier in recent years, he concedes: "Piece
of piss, to be honest, compared to what it was." His mobile phone
responds to vocal commands (assuming it understands his accent, which
isn't always), and speaks to him when he taps it. Screen reading
software means blind and visually impaired people can use applications
from Gmail to Excel, and even get the newspaper read to them online
(Hi to anyone who is. Enjoy).
Plus, Latif continues: "There's a solution these days for even the
most intractable problems. Like when you've got two tins left in the
larder, and you don't know which is the beans and which the peaches.
The number of times I've opened something, even started eating, and
discovered it wasn't, well . . . what I thought it was. Anyway, now
there's an app for that."
But navigating a crowded airport is another matter. Latif has his
white cane, essential when he has to "go freestyle". But it's just
more comfortable, sometimes, to be led. So what you do is, you stand
beside and just slightly in front of the VI you're leading, and offer
them your elbow. They grasp it lightly ("Clicking on," Latif calls
it), and off you go. A tad slower than you otherwise might, but not
much.
It's that leading arm that transmits the messages. You have to talk,
too, obviously, but it's mainly just natural, friendly chat,
interspersed with the odd alert ("Step up. Escalator coming. Here, my
hand's on the back of the chair. Narrow gap: I'll go ahead.") Blind
people feel in control when they're holding your elbow, and will let
go if they get anxious (or so says How to be a Sighted Traveller, the
leaflet Traveleyes sends to its sighted customers).
You notice, too, that blind people pick up an awful lot more than you
do through their other senses. "I can hear the hand-dryers," says
Latif. "Is that the gents, by any chance? Might just nip in." Or, to a
slightly nonplussed security man, "I can smell fruit. Exotic?
Strawberries?" A fresh stick of Juicy Fruit gum, the guard admits.
You have to be a bit careful what you say, but you soon learn that an
inadvertent "Did you see that?" or "Look, over there!" is not going to
upset anyone. And it's revelatory to realise how very different the
world is for those who can't properly see it: hugging Latif on a cafe
terrace on day three, Judy exclaims, "Oh, but you're much bigger than
I thought. And no hair!" What's it like, discovering someone you've
been talking to for the past three days is nothing like the picture
you had in your mind's eye?
Latif's beaming presence helps hold the whole thing together. He's a
quite remarkable man; much in demand as a motivational speaker, and
you can see why. A maths and finance graduate, he worked as a
management accountant for eight years before striking out on his own,
overcoming untold obstacles to launch a highly successful company, win
a fistful of business and disability awards, and gladhand presidents
and prime ministers.
"This holiday," he announces to all on the bus from Naples airport to
Sorrento, "is all about enjoying things on an equal basis. So if
you're blind, don't worry, so am I. And if you're sighted, don't be so
bloody clever."
There are some 157,000 people registered blind in Britain, and 155,000
registered visually impaired. Only 8% were born with their condition,
and around 80% have some degree of visual memory: say what you see,
and they'll know what you're talking about.
When it comes to holidays, though, beyond imposing again on
long-suffering friends and relatives, they have shockingly few
options. A charity called Vitalise runs holidays for people with a
range of disabilities, but that's about it. (Not just in Britain,
either: 30% of Traveleyes's VIs come from abroad, mainly North
America, Australia and New Zealand. There are three Canadians, from
Toronto and Vancouver, on this trip.)
Manifestly, Traveleyes meets a need. "I want to do what I want to do,
go where I want to go," says Judy, over dinner in the hotel one night.
"I want to choose. I don't want to be reliant on my friends. Why
should I be? It's not fair on me, and it's not fair on them." For
Jenny, on her sixth trip with the company, "You just wouldn't do the
same things if you went with friends. And you feel completely safe.
That's really important."
The Traveleyes group visits Pompei. Photograph: Sean Smith for the
Guardian Strolling one morning through a Sorrento lemon grove,
stopping to touch and feel the fruit, exclaiming at the scent of lemon
from a leaf plucked and rubbed between their fingers, Emma Shaw from
Doncaster, on her fourth Traveleyes holiday, explains why they're
important to her. "I have macular degeneration," she says. "I can make
outlines out, but the details have gone. I know this is a tree, but I
can't see the leaves.
"So the thing is, now that a lot of my friends are married, and my
parents are both retired, it's just very difficult to get away. And
you do start to feel isolated; with modern technology, it's so easy
just to stay at home. This, well, brings you back, somehow. You feel .
. . included again."
Included is one way of putting it. On the way back through town,
stopping to wonder at the heft of a tomato and inhale an olive oil in
the market, we're drawn into a shop selling limoncello, the
lemon-based liqueur of the Gulf of Naples. Sensing a celebratory mood,
the proprietor turns up the music. "Here we say: we have a lemon, we
have a girl, we have a party!" he proclaims. And to Dean Martin
belting out Volare, then That's Amore, everyone – unembarrassed –
dances.
For sighted travellers, the motivation for this kind of holiday is
maybe more complex. There are two sighted couples on this trip, but
many are single. Several have tried singles holidays, without enjoying
them: too full of "people out for themselves"; you end up "feeling
lonelier when you leave than when you arrived".
Irene Sylvester, from Wakefield in West Yorkshire, is newly retired.
"I was looking for something I could do on my own," she says, "but
that wouldn't make me feel I was on my own." Jayn Bond, an HR and
employment law specialist from Cambridge, wanted "a holiday that
wouldn't make me feel lonely, and where I could contribute."
Others have less exalted reasons: Glyn Evans, a signalman from
Rotherham, has been on a dozen Traveleyes holidays. He loves "the
laughs. They're great people." That's why Francesca Gomez comes too:
"At work, everyone has a different agenda. Here they're just open, and
honest with themselves. No pretensions, no acting, no front to keep up
– just nice people, with issues to overcome. It's harder than slobbing
on the beach, but you feel good being a part of it."
He's on to something here, Latif, that's about more than offering
holidays for blind people. He knew the idea would work as soon as he
tried it out for himself, with a student who used to read his
textbooks for him at university: both of them had a ball. The first
organised holiday, to a farmhouse in Andalucia in 2004, was a roaring
success; since then, Traveleyes has grown by 50% each year. And more
than 60% of its business is repeat, from people who've been before.
Are there never problems? "You might think," he says, "that the cheap
holiday thing could attract the wrong people. We do a criminal records
check and an employer's check; it's slightly tricky – you're not
employing people, but you do have to be aware that they're dealing
with vulnerable adults. But honestly, there's never been a problem."
Destinations are chosen carefully; there has to be plenty of
opportunity for non-visual exploration. But blind people also love
sightseeing, Latif insists. "The fact I can't see the sights only
heightens my curiosity," he says. "I ask the sighted guide to describe
it really well. Then the scents, the sounds, the tastes . . . Your
imagination runs riot. I can walk away from a view with a better
picture of it than a sighted person who has just stopped for a
glance."
It's not uncommon, Latif says, for guests staying in the same hotel to
ask whether they can join a Traveleyes group, "because they've seen
the time we're having, the atmosphere". So what actually is happening
here? A married couple, Dick and Lizzie Bulkely, turned away at the
last minute by another firm because of Lizzie's advancing glaucoma,
put their finger on it.
"I'm really interested in how these groups work and get on," says
Dick, a retired clinical psychologist. "The constant negotiating, the
compromise, the concern. There are real, important people skills going
on here, all the time. I really like it. And you don't come across it
very often."
That's what it is, I think; why this group of people feels so unusual.
It's not because some are blind and some can see. It's because they're
a bunch of people determined to have a great time together, and
looking out for each other all the while. Really caring. Dick is
absolutely right: it's not something you come across very often.
source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/30/blind-people-travel-traveleyes
--
"The best things and most beautiful things in the world Cannot be seen
or even touched. They must be felt within the heart." — Helen Keller
Avinash Shahi
M.A. Political Science
CPS JNU
New Delhi India
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