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

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

Andy Isaacson is a writer and photographer. His work for The Times has taken him to every corner of the world, and he has transmitted what he’s experienced through his images. But recently, Isaacson took a trip unlike any he’d taken before. Not because of where he traveled, but because of how he traveled. Paired with a set of unlikely travel companions, he put down his camera and experienced the word through touch, smell and sound. On today’s episode of “The Sunday Daily,” Isaacson talks with Host Michael Barbaro about a trip that forever changed the way he travels.   On today's episode: Andy Isaacson, a contributing writer and photographer for The New York Times.   Background Reading Sites Unseen: What Travel Is Like for Those Who Can’t See   Photo credit: Andy Isaacson Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavarro. 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 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, for the Times, from every continent on Earth. Yeah. 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 work. 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 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 de Kuna. 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 be able to look at a map and put your fingers 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 dominated. 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 how that can enrich an experience. And so I think that goes to show just how much richer travel can be when you activate other senses. To have the charcoal smells, the animal smells. movie. 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 in my head for a while. And some years later, I learned about this company called Travel Eyes, 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, descriptions, and help with navigation. And together, they could have a deeper, richer travel experience. You're right. Sited folk just think about the site and all the other things are just afterthought. The company was founded by a man named Amar Latif. He was raised in Glasgow and lost his site at 18 due to retinitis pigment.

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, your world 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 holiday. 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 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. 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 experience. 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 sight of 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, gives them 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 Travelize offered the promise of that. It offered the promise of a new, different, more immersive way of experiencing a 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 and the most multi-sensory place on earth. One of us is a peacock, with one of those really long tails that's running across the road. 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 cacophany of Old Delhi. We're moving through Old Delhi. We're navigating uneven pavement. We're dodging rickshaws, people coming in to try to sell us things, 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,

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 a really imper people, you'd be walking through that, and you'd perceive you'd sort of walk through an entrance, you'd come into some sort of antechamber or a little bit, and then you come for 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 travel or VI, as Travel Eyes calls them. And his name was Luke.

The floor is And dilated. This texture is smoothish, but not... We make our way through security, and we line up with all the other tourists angling for photographs. To see what you can do. And I attempt to describe, for Luke,

one of the most iconic visual pictures in the world. Sunrise at the Taj Mahal. Maybe a thousand meters. The reflective pools in front of us. It is a gorgeous white marble monument set against an ever-whitening 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 walk the grounds. Let's walk a little forward here, and we're going to take a step down right here. The ground is quite level. This is all pure marble. I can tell us, but I'm certainly, I've lost some tactile sort of feedback with these foot coverings on. It's really weird.

Fads, I think. They're roughly than I believe. Three. 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 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, entirely in your hands. So I tried to rise to the occasion. Luke, If you look, tilt your head up, we are looking straight up at the facade of Taj Mahal. So I'm going to 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 velocity. I assume that's probably one of the inlaid. And it's green. Yeah, colors. We are now in the inner, approaching the sort of inner chamber of the tune. Yeah, this is very, this is, you get a lot of echo reverb from Pickers' voices. Is that like your bolted ceiling?

Yes, Bubba's is a vaulted ceiling in this ante chamber. Up and over a threshold here, Luke. Ah, no, did. The sound has increased, this is really a... It's like a chorus. We're now in the innermost chamber of the Taj Mahal. Yeah, the echo is doubled or tripled. Yeah, you get, it's almost like your inside speaker.

You know, I heard somebody singing over to the, sort of over to the right, the way, front of the sounds. So now we're going to, now we're going to, now we're, we're, going through a narrow threshold from where we came. This is a wooden surface that's kind of a boardwalk that they've built over the marble flooring. 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 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 we're looking at is the Yamuna River. Yeah. This is beautiful, placid river that runs along the backside of the Taj. What does it feel? What do you sense in front of us?

It was wide over the space. So he was running around with the bells. It's a child wearing bengals on her feet, around her ankles. Just turning it back around. 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 is the specific, like, nature of your visual impairment? For me, at this point, I don't have any vision. I had prosthetic guys. And Candy told me, when I asked her what she wants descriptions of, she said, the whole sights thing doesn't really interest me. I'm more interested in hearing about the reality of India. I'm depending on 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 like laying on a bench or something, that part I find, you know, has like more of an impact, I guess, than, you know, there's a tree over here with yellow leaves. So I peered out the window and I pointed out the grittier aspects of India. 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.

It was kind of interesting. This one kid, little kid came up and like padded my leg and I reached out to say, what it was and I felt, I don't know if it was a boy or a girl, but their hand, and 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, I just thought about, you know, a child, like having rough, such rough hands. 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. 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 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 it made me think of this well-known Hindu parable that one day, as we're crossing the Rajasdani 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. 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 blindman 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. Now let me take... 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 travelers and having them describe their perceptions gave me a fuller picture of India. Just like the parable says.

Just like the parable says. There was a moment in which I remember one of the VI travelers at the Taj Mahal described this oam that he heard in the mausoleum. The hum, the generic hum in the Taj Mahal, it has like an own pitch, an own pitch just from people talking to each other about the various, various things.

And he said 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 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. It reminds me of something that Amar Latif once told me about the difference between how blind and sighted people experience travel. This is the guy who founded travel as. 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, you told me it's like reading a book.

You know, because you're imagining things in your own head. So you get in these descriptions, and then you're in a book. For sighted travelers. It's like, you know, the film version. It's more like watching a film. Watching the film and, you know, maybe the book version, it's 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. 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. 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 Dow compared to our version. The preparations would suggest the arch is perhaps 20 feet up, 30. All the sensors together build a cohesive image, comprising more elements than just sight,

Because riding, I did like riding in that on the street. I mean, before every bomb and every turn. It's almost like a race car because of the engineer. There's something scraping over there as if somebody's brushing or cleaning something. Yeah, it's a guy we're moving the bird poop. Andy? Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael.

Today's episode was produced by Alex Barron, with help from Luke Fanderplug, It was edited by Wendy Doer. Our production manager is Franny Kartoth, and production assistants came from Dahlia Haddad. This episode was engineered by Daniel Ramirez, and features original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lazzano. Special thanks to Alicia Bha It, Diane Wong, and Alicia Hari Dissani Gupta.

That's it for the daily on Sunday. I'm Michael Bavarro. See you tomorrow.