On a breezy monsoon Sunday last August, six blind people and three amputees in Pune, India were prepping for a 300-mile bike through the Himalayas.
“There will be times in your life when there will be no road for you to travel on and you’ll have to make your own road,” Divyanshu Ganatra, the leader of the trip, who is also blind, says of the precipitous journey from Manali to Khardung La, the highest road in the world accessible by car. “But if you want it badly enough, it’s worth putting every last bit of effort into it.”
It’s a popular bike route in the summer months, when the snow melts to clear the 13,000-foot-high path. Framed by steep descents, it is well-paved at its best and made of mud and gravel at its worst.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it had never been biked by a blind person before Ganatra. He lost his sight from glaucoma when he was 19 and wanted to prove the extreme journey was for anyone. “But first, I had to try it out myself,” he says.
In 2016, he successfully completed it in eight days on a tandem bicycle with a sighted partner, faster than the average 11 to 12. Then, he opened up the experience to others through his non-profit Adventures Beyond Barriers Foundation (ABBF). ABBF introduced tandem cycling to India, which is used around the world for the blind and the sighted to ride together.
Running a trip like that might seem difficult, but not to Ganatra. He’s taken disabled and able-bodied thrill-seekers scuba diving, mountaineering, paragliding, and marathon running since 2014.
There’s a particular demand for his trips in India, where there are 26.8 million people with disabilities, according to the 2011 census. Globally, this market has swollen to over two billion people, and includes seniors, the temporarily disabled, and the family and caregivers who would like to travel with them.
For ABBF and a handful of other organizations making both adventure sports and a range of travel experiences in India accessible, helping people with disabilities isn’t just about doing good, it’s a business opportunity. The trips are also predicated on a radical notion: for the able-bodied, going on a trip with disabled participants isn’t a burden, but an opportunity.
PPrasad Gurav, a 44-year-old information technology consultant from Pune, trekked and rock climbed through his youth. But when he was a teenager, his eyesight started to deteriorate. It was retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disorder that caused him to completely lose his peripheral vision after a few years. With that, he lost his depth perception — and then his confidence. He gave up adventure sports.
It took Gurav twelve years, and the support of his adventure-loving wife, to try trekking again. But when they were climbing Stok Kangri, the highest mountain in the Stok Range of the Himalayas, his wife got altitude sickness. She needed to get down the mountain, but their guide had to stay with Gurav because of his vision impairment. She managed to make a hasty retreat alone, but they realized they needed a safety net for emergencies.
The leaders of traditional organized trips were hesitant about including Gurav. “One of them said that he wasn’t sure he would like to include someone with a disability,” Gurav says. “I tried hard convincing him, but he didn’t want to take a risk.”
But then he found ABBF, and he tandem biked 340 miles in 10 days with a seeing partner. “It was empowering to be able to meet the challenge, and do something that’s not expected of me,” he says.
During ABBF’s orientation and practice sessions, paired participants decide on communication cues, like whether the sighted partner will whistle to warn of a puddle. Amputees discuss the route, including where they’ll take breaks to get time off their prosthetics. Wheelchair-using scuba divers are paired with two instructors, instead of the usual one. For marathons, also run in pairs, runners decide things like whether they’ll hold hands or connect at the elbow during the race.
Participants find that rather than creating tension, the partnerships create discussion and help bust myths about disability.
FFor those who aren’t adrenaline junkies, a growing number of companies are creating more traditional travel experiences for the disabled. Neha Arora started Planet Abled in 2016, a travel company that organizes accessible trips to India’s mountains, temple towns, and the Ganges.
Arora has a blind father and a mother who uses a wheelchair and she says that on her company’s trips she regularly encounters the “insensitivity and the social stigma attached to disability” that stopped her family from traveling when she was growing up.
She’s had temple authorities refuse travelers from entering temples because it’s “impure” or “the wheelchair user cannot sit at the same level as the gods,” referring to the fact that devotees must sit on the floor, not chairs.
When it’s not outright prejudice, it’s the lack of ramps, braille, and unnavigable buses and trains. “A lack of accessible infrastructure is a huge problem in India,” says Shivani Gupta, a Delhi-based architectural access consultant.
It’s also very difficult to get information before you travel. Justin Jesudas, who is a quadriplegic, an international swimmer, and a trained scuba diver living in Chennai, can rarely find out if he’ll be able to get around a hotel by looking at their website. “For a lot of hotels, accessibility is equivalent to having just a ramp, but it’s much beyond that,” he says, referring to high toilets or an edge in front of an elevator.
But as people become more aware of the demand for — and opportunity in — accessible travel, things are changing.
There have been some promising legal wins: India’s Rights of Persons With Disabilities Act (RPWD Act) mandated in April 2017 that all public buildings have to be fully accessible within five years. In December, the mandate was upheld by the Supreme Court.
And of course, accessibility isn’t just a human right, it’s an economic opportunity. A research study commissioned by global travel technology provider Amadeus, found that travelers with accessibility needs in the U.S., European Union, and India would increase their travel budget by 34 percent if barriers were eliminated.
Until accessibility is a priority everywhere in India, organizations like Planet Abled will continue to fill in the gaps. Arora brings portable ramps and custom-made models of monuments to UNESCO World Heritage sites like the Taj Mahal and Nalanda University in Bihar. She also gets permission for the visually impaired to touch artifacts in museums and foliage in gardens.
Sonal Shah, a visually disabled lecturer from Ahmedabad, says she could make the most of sightseeing because the storyteller Arora brought along a trip to Ooty gave her a description of the scenery outside.
Arora has found that most monuments have just one braille information board, for the sake of compliance, and few have audio guides. The biggest barrier is invisibility, she says — since very few people with disabilities are able to visit, employees don’t recognize their needs.
“Before my first trip to Qutub Minar, it took me two prior visits to figure who held the key to the accessible washroom,” she says of organizing a trip to Delhi’s soaring 13th century minaret.
The trips work because, similar to Ganatra’s model, the able-bodied and the disabled work together.
OOften, the initial hesitation to interact with a person with a disability gives way to deep camaraderie once people with diverse needs spend time together. And often, this understanding bleeds into the rest of participants’ lives.
An architect and builder who ran a marathon with ABBF says that he would start designing inclusive buildings, says Yashasvini Rajeshwar, ABBF’s former media and communications head.
Nupur Pittie, a Pune-based corporate trainer and an avid trekker, was skeptical when her husband told her about one of ABBF’s marathons, where she would hold a blind runner’s hand. Her instant reaction was, “Really? Are you sure of what you’re saying? Is that even possible?”
But Pittie likes challenges, so she gave it a shot. “I was thinking, will she stamp my foot or will I stamp hers while running?” But once she ran the first marathon, she never looked back. “My partner matched my energy and excitement and there were several moments during the run when she motivated me to keep going,” she says.
Everyone gets tired during a marathon; altitude sickness affects the able-bodied and the disabled alike. “The tipping point for the participants,” says Ganatra, “is when they experience this sameness some time during the expedition.”
