Nothing Ventured. Disabled People Travel The World - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

A collection of over 100 tales by disabled travellers, describing their adventures, their setbacks and ultimately - more often than not - their triumphs. The stories inform, inspire and delight: a pair of disabled rally drivers (one with polio, the other with an artificial arm) take on the Himalayas; a mother crams her two small children and wheelchair-bound husband into a Vauxhall Chevette and drives to Spain; a deaf man describes a safari in Zimbabwe; a young paraplegic goes alone to join an Aids research project in Sierra Leone. The overwhelming feeling is one of optimism, but the book also highlights some of the problems of disabled travel. When weighed against the traveller's sense of achievement the mishaps often seem insignificant: few words are devoted to them, and somebody always saves the day with kind inventiveness or adaptability. A group copes with sleeping among the slot machines in the hotel lobby because their wheelchairs won't fit in the lift; a guide carries a man, paralyzed from the hips down, on his back so he can catch sight of flightless cormorants in the Galapagos; reception staff haul a man in a wheelchair up and down two flights of stairs as and when required for a week. But there are villains too - the tour operators and travel agents whose blithe assurances all too often fall apart when confronted by reality; the passengers who grumble because they have to move seats to accommodate a traveller who cannot walk; the mechanics who do a shoddy job on a disabled person's car, knowing that it is a lifeline.

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