Luke walked beside me, one hand curled around my arm, the other tapping a gentle rhythm with his white cane. We were crossing the Taj Mahal’s grounds in India just after sunrise, the air already balmy and faintly perfumed.
From the scattered murmur of tourists, Luke said he could sense a grand, open space around us. I described the Persian-style gardens – reflecting pools, clipped shrubs, stone walkways in perfect symmetry. Then I read aloud a sign: “Don’t make direct eye contact with monkeys.”
Near the mausoleum’s entrance, the ground changed – rough sandstone yielding to cool marble, smooth beneath our feet. I guided Luke’s hands to the white facade. As his fingers roamed, Luke recalled the photographs he’d seen as a child, before retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary eye disease, gradually narrowed his vision and then, at 18, took it away.
“I get the impression of something opulent and magnificent,” he told me.
Inside, we joined the flow of tourists circling the tombs of Shah Jahan and his beloved, Mumtaz Mahal. Their voices echoed beneath the dome, drawn out into long, soft reverberations. In the past, this space carried recitations of the Quran – with acoustics meant to evoke the sound of paradise.
A deeper sense
What does it mean to travel somewhere new and not be able to see it? That question led me on a 10-day journey through northern India’s Golden Triangle with Traveleyes, a British tour company that pairs visually impaired and sighted travellers.
So much of the language we use around travel – sightseeing, scenic vistas, must-see lists – assumes that the world is best, or only, understood through the eyes. But as writer Pico Iyer wrote to me in an email before the trip: “Travel is not about seeing the sights so much as opening oneself up to the unfamiliar – a matter of perception and vision in a deeper sense.”
For years, whenever I returned from a trip abroad, a friend of mine would ask: What did it smell like? I always fumbled for a meaningful answer. What layers of experience, what deeper kind of vision, had I been missing?
Amar Latif, a British entrepreneur, founded Traveleyes in 2004 to address the lack of accessible travel options for blind and visually impaired people. After losing most of his sight by age 18 because of retinitis pigmentosa, Amar struggled to travel independently.
Mainstream tour companies often rejected him, insisting he bring a caregiver and excluding him from more adventurous activities like hiking and skiing. Those exclusions pushed him to create something of his own: a company that would allow blind travellers to explore the world without relying on friends or family.
“Friends and family switch off,” he told me. “They’re not as eager to describe things.”
Traveleyes runs on a simple but radical model: It pairs blind and sighted travellers as equal companions. Sighted participants assist with navigation and describe visual details – in exchange for a discounted trip – while blind travellers bring a fresh perspective that often deepens the experience for both.
The company promises “a truly multisensory travel experience”, with itineraries designed to engage all five senses.
No prior experience was required, just a friendly attitude and a willingness to describe what you saw. Each day, I’d be paired with a different visually impaired traveller – referred to as a “VI” – and together we’d find our rhythm.
I met the group at a hotel in New Delhi. Among the travellers were two women – one visually impaired – who had met on a previous Traveleyes trip; this was now their sixth journey together.
On our first day I was paired with Daniel, a 38-year-old software consultant from Oxford, England. It was his 12th trip with the company; he’d previously visited Romania, Bhutan and Jordan.
Daniel had several eye conditions, including nystagmus, which causes involuntary eye movement and makes it difficult to focus or judge depth.
As our tour bus crawled through Delhi’s snarling traffic, Daniel reflected on how blind and visually impaired people make sense of the world.
“Everyone builds the world in their own way,” he said. Some rely on the spatial qualities of sound, others on scent, or even the feel of air moving around them.
“Even sighted people use some combination of these elements,” he pointed out. “But when you’re deprived of one, you compensate with the others, and everyone does that differently.”
The next day, on our drive to Agra, I was paired with Candie, a blind woman from the United States. Born with glaucoma, she could once detect light and the presence of large objects, but her vision gradually deteriorated. A decade ago, at 40, she had one eye removed and now has an ocular prosthesis.
At a cafeteria where we had lunch, I described the triangular structure of a samosa and the ingredients in dal, then used clock-face references to guide Candie to each item on her tray. She paid for the meal, carefully handling the rupees – colourful, textured bills adorned with traditional Indian motifs and Gandhi’s portrait at the centre. I described those to her, too.
I was beginning to notice how speaking these details aloud sharpened my perception. Things I might have otherwise overlooked or skimmed past – the kind of prosaic elements that quietly define a place, like the black-and-white stripes on Delhi’s kerbs or the mandala murals painted on highway overpasses – became more visible to me when I put them into words.
In naming them, I was also etching them into memory.
We eventually arrived in Ranthambore, a town in Rajasthan near a national park that was once the private hunting grounds of the Jaipur royal family. Today, it’s considered one of the best places in India to spot wild Bengal tigers. Before our safari, in the hotel gift shop, I placed a tiger figurine in Candie’s hands.
She ran her fingers along its long torso and stout legs, tracing the raised stripes.
“Oh wow,” she said. “It’s much longer than I’d thought!”
We toured the park in an open-topped bus, its diesel engine rattling as we bounced along rutted dirt tracks that wound through dry forest, open meadows and rocky outcroppings. Every so often, our driver stopped at the sight of antelope, sambar deer or a quick-moving mongoose.
Channelling David Attenborough, I narrated for Candie as a peacock fanned his feathers in a slow, deliberate courtship display.
The next day, I experienced my own version of that thrill aboard an auto rickshaw in Bundi, a hillside town known for its blue-painted houses and ancient step wells. I was paired with Chris, an accessibility specialist for the British government. Highly expressive with his eyes, Chris explained that he had optic nerve hypoplasia, a congenital condition that left him with a “pinhole-camera-type view of the world”.
I closed my eyes as we climbed toward Bundi’s palace, perched above the town. The sudden jolting turns, the rush of wind, the blare of horns and the shifting smells – spices, incense, street food, exhaust, cow dung – turned the ride into a visceral blur of motion, sound and scent. I felt every brake, every bump and sway.
Chris described it much the same way. “I feel all the micro movements, it’s like a 1970s fairground ride,” he said as we twisted up the road.
Don’t manage
Over the course of the trip, I’d heard a few visually impaired travellers grumble that some of the sighted participants were being too heavy-handed in their approach to guiding – “over-warning and over-cautioning”, as one put it.
As we boarded the bus to Udaipur the next day, Suzy, our tour manager, announced that some VIs felt as if they were being “passed around like furniture”, with items taken from their hands as if they were children. The issue was clear: Sighted guides sometimes forget that their VI companions are independent adults.
“I’m another human being,” Susan, a VI from California, told me. “I’ll say what I need. When someone sees themselves as a helper, the whole relationship gets skewed.”
Traveleyes promotes guiding as companionship, not caregiving – someone to explore with, to share a drink at the hotel bar with, not someone to manage.
“It’s a little like a complex dance routine,” Chris told me.
“You have to learn each other’s moves and try not to tread on each other’s toes, but you also have to give each other room to learn and grow.”
On the last day of our tour, in Jaipur, we visited a jewellery workshop and the Amber Palace, a hilltop fort of mirrored halls and ancient ramparts. Later, we stopped at a community-run elephant park, the kind of modest place where you can feed bananas to the animals.
Suzy guided Candie up to one of the elephants.
Candie reached out, wrapped her arms around the elephant’s thick leg and slowly traced her hands along its limber trunk. I asked what it felt like.
She paused. “Honestly,” she said, “... like a tall, obese man with a big, hairy leg.” – ANDY ISAACSON/©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
