How Blind Travelers Navigate the Globe

In 2018, Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier realized that three of their 4 kids had been shedding their imaginative and prescient due to retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a progressive, incurable retinal illness. (I have RP as effectively; I used to be identified a bit later than the Lemay-Pelletier youngsters, after I was a young person, and at this time, in center age, I’ve acquired a fraction of the imaginative and prescient I used to.) “The hardest part with the diagnosis was the inaction,” Lemay says close to the start of Blink, a brand new documentary concerning the household. Lemay met with a “specialist” who advised her that, within the absence of a treatment, the very best factor for her to do was to construct up her kids’s storehouse of psychological pictures. The specialist prompt that the household web page by way of an illustrated encyclopedia collectively, “to look at the pictures of elephants and giraffes,” Lemay recalled, “so when they do go blind, at least they have an image of what it looks like.”

But why take a look at photos of giraffes, Lemay thought, when the true factor is extra indelible? The household, who stay in Montreal, had all the time wished to journey the world, and now that they had an pressing motivator. “Let’s go all in and fill their visual memory with as many beautiful things as we can,” she mentioned.

Blink follows the household’s journey to fifteen nations, hopscotching throughout a grid of Instagram-bright pictures: trekking at daybreak within the Himalayas; camel rides in Egypt; whitewater rafting within the Amazon River Basin. National Geographic produced the movie, and the household’s journey is completely according to that model’s starvation for vivid, shiny, full-color panoramas.

“Do you think, even if you couldn’t see, you’d be able to enjoy a place like this?” Lemay asks her daughter, Mia, as they watch a hazy however dazzling orange sundown over White Desert National Park in Egypt. The query reveals the unfairness lurking beneath it: How may you take pleasure in it? It’s a query blind vacationers get on a regular basis, and I want that, as a substitute of a specialist, Lemay had sought out some precise blind individuals to find out about experiencing the world by way of 4 senses.

She may have, for example, picked up A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler by Jason Roberts. It’s a biography of James Holman, who, in 1832, turned the primary blind man to circumnavigate the globe. Holman’s adventures are brimming with sensory element, from the melting metallic tip of his cane as he summits a really lively Mount Vesuvius to the furtive kisses he bestows upon a Kyrgyz maiden throughout a bone-rattling horse-drawn dash throughout the frozen Russian steppes. “I am constantly asked…what is the use of traveling to one who cannot see?” Holman wrote in his memoirs. “The picturesque in nature, it is true, is shut out from me, but perhaps this very circumstance affords a stronger zest to curiosity.” Holman argues that his blindness forces him to make “a more close and searching examination of details”—conversations with strangers, and an attunement to cultural distinction—than the typical sighted traveler who, he writes, “might satisfy himself by the superficial view.”

The Blink mother and father’ resolution to reply to the worry, powerlessness, and heartbreak they really feel within the face of their kids’s analysis is comprehensible. In a hyper-visual society that facilities sight because the locus of all information and expertise, from the astronomer’s telescope to the lover’s gaze, why wouldn’t they mourn the upcoming lack of sight and, just like the terminal affected person, plunge themselves into the very best the visible world has to supply earlier than they fall into the unknown chasm of blindness?

But, taking a look at their journey from the angle of a blind individual, the household’s response to the analysis sends a troubling message to their kids—and, within the face of the explosion of media curiosity their story generated—to the broader world. The title of Lemay’s new guide about her journey, Plein Leurs Yeux (in English, roughly Fill Their Eyes), gives a neat abstract of their mission. But this crucial frames blindness as a visible dying sentence, and turns their journey right into a form of death-row final meal. 

Mona Minkara, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Northeastern University, has been blind from childhood. In 2019, she created Planes, Trains, and Canes, a YouTube sequence that follows her solo journeys around the globe, together with journeys to Manila, Johannesburg, and Tokyo. “The whole premise of my show is that you don’t need your eyesight to see the world,” she advised me.

In her sequence, Minkara enlists a sighted buddy to comply with her with a digicam—and offers her strict guidelines to not intervene. The movies provide a uncommon and visceral take a look at how a blind individual travels independently. Like the journeys of any traveler, Minkara’s are a patchwork of well-laid plans and considerable contingencies, together with useful (and, continuously, well-meaning however decidedly unhelpful) strangers, fortunate guesses, fallacious turns, and pleasant surprises. Minkara, carrying her hijab, with a white cane in a single hand and pulling an enormous curler bag with the opposite, is clearly exhausted and pissed off in some conditions. But she maintains an unflappable, wry, and finally open and joyful angle towards the individuals and locations she encounters. “I’m a curious person,” she advised me. “I explore the world through my science, and I also do it by traveling.”

Like Holman, Minkara sees her blindness as a motivator to have interaction extra deeply with the locations she visits. “We live in the age of Instagram,” she mentioned. “People are always snapping pictures, posting shots of a mountain—but what differentiates one mountain from another? Honestly, it’s the stories.” It’s solely whenever you work together with individuals, studying about their lives and the historical past of a spot, that the panorama comes into reduction.

Tom Babinszki, who’s been blind since delivery, for years labored for IBM, the place his job required touring the world to coach colleagues. “My guide dog has been to thirteen countries,” he advised me, and he’s been to round 30. He now runs a consultancy and has a publication, Even Grounds, devoted to “inclusive and accessible travel for blind people.” Like Minkara, he loves the social facet of journey: “I always find the people more interesting than anything else,” he advised me. 

But he additionally revels in his different senses. Taste is essential—on a visit to India, he was so enamored of the meals at his resort that he ate breakfast twice a day—and, above all, contact. Each time IBM despatched him his itinerary, he’d instantly discover out if there was an area coin museum or coin membership he may go to in his time without work. “I’ve touched millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver,” he mentioned with delight. “Three-thousand-year-old currency; blocks of silver; beaver skin; everything anyone has ever paid with.”

Despite the message that the headlines concerning the Lemay-Pelletier household sends to the world about blindness, their journey does provide one thing of deep worth. It will instill of their kids a spirit of exploration they’ll share with Holman, Babinszki, Minkara, and the generations of different blind vacationers who preceded and can comply with them: a willingness to get misplaced, to tolerate the discomfort and worry of an unfamiliar place, and to have the religion that, ultimately, it can all have been well worth the hassle.  

A model of this story first appeared within the March 2025 concern of Travel + Leisure underneath the headline “The Realm of the Senses.”