“Going on holiday with blind people opens your eyes,” says Wendy Coley. She often goes on tours with Travel Eyes, a company that takes tourists traveling around the world. For each tour, half of the people can see and half can’t. A person who can see travels with a person who can’t. The world is there for sighted (有视力的) people but that can cause problems for the blind. So, sighted members might describe the size and color of a building, or the smiles of strangers passing by. They might explain the food, “Our lunch is a sandwich in the center of your plate, and chips in a bowl to the right of your plate.”
Clearly, it is good for blind travelers. They are able to learn about new places and make new friends. “You don’t worry about danger any more. That’s really important,” says Jenny Tween, a blind tourist. But it is also of benefit (益处) to sighted travelers. Wendy is one of them. She says that when you describe what you see, you see things in a very different way. The tour manager Hannah Vince agrees, “Sighted people learn a lot from these trips. It’s a two-way thing.” Traveling with blind people and describing the world to them makes sighted people go more slowly and look more closely at colors, shapes, and the sizes of things. Blind people can also help sighted people find more about the smells of food or flowers, and the sounds of music or traffic.
In the end, this isn’t a story about people who can see helping people who can’t. It’s about people with different abilities showing each other new ways of experiencing the world and meeting new friends.