Avinash,
Thanks very much,
Again a very cool article
thanks
On 1/16/12, avinash shahi <shahi88avin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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