How Blind Travelers Navigate the Globe

In 2018, Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier learned that three of their four children were losing their vision because of retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a progressive, incurable retinal disease. (I have RP as well; I was diagnosed a bit later than the Lemay-Pelletier kids, when I was a teenager, and today, in middle age, I’ve got a fraction of the vision I used to.) “The hardest part with the diagnosis was the inaction,” Lemay says near the beginning of Blink, a new documentary about the family. Lemay met with a “specialist” who told her that, in the absence of a cure, the best thing for her to do was to build up her children’s storehouse of mental images. The specialist suggested that the family page through an illustrated encyclopedia together, “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 look at pictures of giraffes, Lemay thought, when the real thing is more indelible? The family, who live in Montreal, had always wanted to travel the world, and now they had an urgent motivator. “Let’s go all in and fill their visual memory with as many beautiful things as we can,” she said.

Blink follows the family’s journey to 15 countries, hopscotching across a grid of Instagram-bright images: trekking at dawn in the Himalayas; camel rides in Egypt; whitewater rafting in the Amazon River Basin. National Geographic produced the film, and the family’s trip is perfectly in line with that brand’s hunger for vivid, glossy, 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 but dazzling orange sunset over White Desert National Park in Egypt. The question reveals the prejudice lurking beneath it: How could you enjoy it? It’s a question blind travelers get all the time, and I wish that, instead of a specialist, Lemay had sought out some actual blind people to learn about experiencing the world through four senses.

She could have, for instance, 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, became the first blind man to circumnavigate the globe. Holman’s adventures 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. “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 difference—than the average sighted traveler who, he writes, “might satisfy himself by the superficial view.”

The Blink parents’ decision to respond to the fear, powerlessness, and heartbreak they feel in the face of their children’s diagnosis is understandable. In a hyper-visual society that centers sight as the locus of all knowledge and experience, from the astronomer’s telescope to the lover’s gaze, why wouldn’t they mourn the impending loss of sight and, like the terminal patient, plunge themselves into the best the visual world has to offer before they fall into the unknown chasm of blindness?

But, looking at their trip from the perspective of a blind person, the family’s response to the diagnosis sends a troubling message to their children—and, in the face of the explosion of media interest their story generated—to the wider world. The title of Lemay’s new book about her trip, Plein Leurs Yeux (in English, roughly Fill Their Eyes), offers a neat summary of their mission. But this imperative frames blindness as a visual death sentence, and turns their trip into a sort of death-row last 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 series that follows her solo journeys around the world, including trips to Manila, Johannesburg, and Tokyo. “The whole premise of my show is that you don’t need your eyesight to see the world,” she told me.

In her series, Minkara enlists a sighted friend to follow her with a camera—and gives her strict rules not to intervene. The videos offer a rare and visceral look at how a blind person travels independently. Like the journeys of any traveler, Minkara’s are a patchwork of well-laid plans and abundant contingencies, including helpful (and, frequently, well-meaning but decidedly unhelpful) strangers, lucky guesses, wrong turns, and delightful surprises. Minkara, wearing her hijab, with a white cane in one hand and pulling a huge roller bag with the other, is clearly exhausted and frustrated in some situations. But she maintains an unflappable, wry, and ultimately open and joyful attitude toward the people and places she encounters. “I’m a curious person,” she told 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 engage more deeply with the places she visits. “We live in the age of Instagram,” she said. “People are always snapping pictures, posting shots of a mountain—but what differentiates one mountain from another? Honestly, it’s the stories.” It’s only when you interact with people, learning about their lives and the history of a place, that the landscape comes into relief.

Tom Babinszki, who’s been blind since birth, for years worked for IBM, where his job required traveling the world to train colleagues. “My guide dog has been to thirteen countries,” he told me, and he’s been to around 30. He now runs a consultancy and has a newsletter, Even Grounds, dedicated to “inclusive and accessible travel for blind people.” Like Minkara, he loves the social aspect of travel: “I always find the people more interesting than anything else,” he told me. 

But he also revels in his other senses. Taste is important—on a trip to India, he was so enamored of the food at his hotel that he ate breakfast twice a day—and, above all, touch. Each time IBM sent him his itinerary, he’d immediately find out if there was a local coin museum or coin club he could visit in his time off. “I’ve touched millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver,” he said with pride. “Three-thousand-year-old currency; blocks of silver; beaver skin; everything anyone has ever paid with.”

Despite the message that the headlines about the Lemay-Pelletier family sends to the world about blindness, their trip does offer something of deep value. It will instill in their children a spirit of exploration they’ll share with Holman, Babinszki, Minkara, and the generations of other blind travelers who preceded and will follow them: a willingness to get lost, to tolerate the discomfort and fear of an unfamiliar place, and to have the faith that, in the end, it will all have been worth the trouble.  

A version of this story first appeared in the March 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “The Realm of the Senses.”