Category: Let's talk
hi all,
i want to travel to certain places outside of my country, in certain cases outside my contenent, and i'm looking for some information if anyone has it.
Firstly, if you want to travel somewhere and stay any length of time, must you be working? secondly, are the various organisations for the blind in the western world obligated to help blind tourists with mobility etc if they are on there own and need to get around, if not, how might one accomplish this task?
Staying with the organisations, if you choose selfcatering accomidation would the organisations or someone related to them help you with finding your way about the property and locality etc?
i'm sure more questions will arise and i will post them as they do.
i hope people can help, as i'm wanting to experience different cultures and ways of life, and my thhinking on it is if sighted people can do it why cant we!
responses sought and appreciated
thanks
Pisces
If i were going to go to anothe rcountry, what i'd do is see if there are other blind people in that country who speak English r another language that I speak, and I'd askthem if I could lodge with them and stick with them. This is because they know what to do and can help out. Each country has their rules for getting a visa. I do have some information somewhere. i'll dig it up and get back to you on that one.
Pisces,
its very depend on where you go, how long you go, and what you want to do. i don't see any problem why we can't do it. i've a friend that have travel almost half of the world by himself, and in ocation with his few friends who's blind too.
do you need to work when you're in a certain country, come to all the question as how long you want to stay, for what reason, and why. i'm not too sure for America, but i'm pretty sure you can have up to 3 to 6 months of visitor visa in Europe, and 3 months in Australia, and verries in Asia. but bare in mind, all these visitor visa aint allow you to work in any circumstances, not even in a volunteer bases.
when they considering your entry to the country which means they either issue or not issueing your visa, they usually will consider how you going to survive there, do you have enough money for your stay, do you have a return ticket, etc etc, and as in our case, they may be interested on who you will be rely on during your stay.
as blind organizations go, it might be very hard, as you'll be there for a short period of time. most of the blind organizations are form for their citizens and permernant residents, not for visitors. but, while i'm writing this, you might able to volunteer yourself with some of the organizations, they might able to provide you accomadation. as far as, will they assist you to get around, bare in mind, they are there for their citizen, to help them O&M, but not for tourist, as like a travel guide will do.
if your finance allow, maybe you might want to consider a personal travel guide instead.
before you plan your trip you might want to consider what country consider blind user friendly country. which will limited your choice. as a general guideline, blind assessable / user friendly country usually are english speaking countries, which may limited you to, Australia, Canada, US, UK, Ireland, New Zealand... other part of the Europe and Asia might be hard as you may have language problems, on top of other problems that might occur.
my advice for you in this stage is, plan where you feel like going, for how long, and go from there. take things slowly, do some research, and it might mean that you may need to write / phoone those blind organizations that is there in the particular spot that you are interested to, to ask for their openion on their country.
all the best.
The U.S. has a list of countries that will get an automatic 90-day tourist visa (or rather a visa wavor), Europe ha similar restrictions, working in said country is never allowed, although if one does it without becoming an official worker or tax payer, I suppose that is something one could arrange may be, although I do not know how.
Never been outside of Europe or North America but travelled plenty between the two on my own without any problems.
thanks for replies so far, i'm just wanting to experience different cultures, i would love to go to australia new zealand, and canada