‘I see the world in a different way to you’

Visually impaired travel writer Rob Crossan shares incidents of joy – and blind man’s rage – while out on the road

Quick travel tip: if you want prompt service at a busy hotel check-in desk, then walk into a glass door. It certainly worked for me in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, last year. The combination of my having the severe visual impairment of albinism, coupled with the Stygian gloom of the charmingly brutalist hotel reception area, caused the collision between an unopened door and my 6ft frame. A trio of bellboys came sprinting from their usual position, huddled by an ashtray near the elevator.

Picking me up and checking for bruises, one of the men asked me, in oddly Lancastrian-edged English, if I needed additional help. Explaining that I was an albino he smiled benignly and led me directly to the manager at the reception desk. “Please take good care of this man,” uttered the doorman solemnly. “He is Albanian.”

Paul Theroux’s comment that “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travellers don’t know where they’re going,” does have a brilliantly unintentional meaning to me as an all-but-blind globetrotter.

Theroux was, I assume, referring to a lack of cultural curiosity. For me though, the quote succeeds better in a more literal sense. I really don’t know where I’m going. Not metaphorically. But literally can’t-read-a-map, what’sthat-thing-I-just-bumped-into, am-I-even-in-the-right-city lost.

Because I see the world differently. And I don’t mean that in a superiortravel-writer aesthete sense. I mean I see the world in a way that, were you to experience it for 10 seconds, would prompt a plummet into the kind of optical terror usually reserved for those who have spent extended periods of time at Luton Airport.

As well as albinism, I have the “dancing eyes” condition of nystagmus. Shaken, baked and combined, this disability duo creates a world of extreme short-sightedness mixed with a liberal sprinkling of mild hallucinating during the daytime and

I’ve come to believe we think about disability in the same way we think about the class system

outright blindness past sunset. Taking this double header of conditions on the road as a travel writer has led me to a few notions which I now hold on to as firmly as any escalator handrail.

Chiefly, I’ve come to believe that we think about disability in much the same way we think about the class system. Initially it’s something that we think we’ve outgrown now we’re all sophisticated, diverse, multi-cultural, planet-jaunting shibboleth-busters.

Whereas at the first sign of dissent (such as a disabled person like me not behaving in a docile, thankful way and loudly telling you to “get lost” if you grab my arm without asking) then a regression to more atavistic attitudes is as brutal as it is swift.

“Shouldn’t they have their own carriage?” I once saw a cashmere-clad couple ask each other in crisply acidic RP English while on a train to Scotland when a tweed-clad man with a particularly dexterous version of Tourette’s shouted loudly (and brilliantly) “c--k sandwich” at them.

I’m not above similar levels of Anglo-Saxon invective myself when on the road. Particularly when confronted with airport departure screens so minuscule and ancient that, at any given moment, I suspect the picture might change to show The Third Man Rob Crossan, left, has albinism and nystagmus, which have a serious effect on his vision while I squint painfully and promptly miss my connecting flight.

Similar levels of BMR (blind man’s rage) emerge when I’m confronted with cities that have more Unesco World Heritage Sites than functioning pedestrian crossings.

And there’s a special place in purgatory for the designers who created the signage on the Washington DC metro system; the fonts are so small as to require access to the

Hubble Space Telescope in order to accurately read them.

At times like this, my salvation is to think of fellow blind writers. Borges, Homer and Joyce all got around in a less-enlightened age and survived. John Milton, once he lost his sight, wrote Paradise Lost. It makes my memoir of travel experiences (working title: “Occasional Hotel Room Key Temporarily Lost, Then Found Again Later) seem trivial in comparison.

And sometimes of course, the conflations and confusions of visually impaired travel can be simply joyous.

I’m thinking of the Swiss couple who gave me their first class seat on a flight back from Los Angeles because I promised to have a Skype chat with their blind teenage son. There was the barista in Melbourne who lured me into participating in an astonishing Fijian fashion shoot that required blind and visually impaired models.

Best of all, there was the juke joint just outside Clarksdale, Mississippi where, on a night where the rain fell like gunfire, I joined a corpulent blues trio onstage to bark out the lyrics to Hellhound on my Trail to an audience of local men, most of whom seemed to have taken Robert Johnson’s advice literally and had long ago sold their souls to the devil at the crossroads.

“You did good Blind Row-Bee,” said the bassist to me afterwards while pouring Wild Turkey bourbon into a chipped tumbler.

“Only reason we let you on stage though is ’cos our singer got struck by lightning last night.”

A salutary warning indeed.

Cashing in my soul to Satan may be one way to make a living. But as for my eyes? Well, even in their current factory flawed, dismal state of repair: as long as I’m still travelling, they’re definitely not for sale.

Are you visually impaired? Or do you travel the world with another disability? We want to hear your opinions on how the travel and tourism industry needs to improve. Please write to travelviews@ telegraph.co.uk