How Blind Travelers Navigate the Globe

"As recounted in Jason Roberts’s biography A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler, the traveler’s journeys are "brimming with sensory detail, from the melting metal tip of his cane as he summits a very active Mount Vesuvius to the furtive kisses he bestows upon a Kyrgyz maiden during a bone-rattling horse-drawn sprint across the frozen Russian steppes." Addressing skeptics, he wrote, “I am constantly asked…what is the use of traveling to one who cannot see?” and insisted that “The picturesque in nature, it is true, is shut out from me, but perhaps this very circumstance affords a stronger zest to curiosity.” He argues that blindness forces “a more close and searching examination of details” — conversations with strangers and an attunement to cultural difference — rather than allowing a traveler to “might satisfy himself by the superficial view.”" - Andrew Leland