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Written by Sean Tyrell – PDA’s VIC Associate Director
This blog was prompted by a loose discussion within the PDA Board about our experiences travelling abroad. After hearing some truly horrific stories from some of our members, I volunteered to try a lighter tone and share some history about how I used a bit of lateral thinking to enjoy a much better time than my early efforts.
Many years ago, I dropped in on my sister Sally’s apartment in East Melbourne to find her hosting drinks for friends just returned from a month in Jamaica. I quickly gathered the champagne had already been flowing for some time and listened in to stories about the girls meeting seven-foot West Indian men through a new dating app called Tinder.
What is Tinder, I hear you say? In short, it’s an early 2010’s dating app that helps singles connect by the sharing of photos and two-sentence introductions. Users scroll through the photos of prospective dates, swiping right to indicate interest and hoping that one will receive a right swipe in return. This then enables an online conversation within the safety of the app that can eventually lead to a hook up in the real physical world. Love Story it is not.
And how might this Tinder app assist a young man with disability travelling abroad? Not at all in the beginning, as it happens. When I first downloaded the app ahead of a four-week trip to Paris, London and New York, I found it was completely inaccessible to a blind person such as myself. I obviously couldn’t see the picks, but the app also had problems preventing me from swiping left or right, sending texts and the like.
I reported this to the Tinder designers and was somewhat surprised when they replied immediately seeking assistance fixing the app. I continued to test it for them as I passed through Paris, London and New York. By the time I was sitting in JFK Airport waiting for my flight home, I was able to start getting matches and receiving requests for a date. Encouraging…
Later the same year, I was back in an airport lounge starting a trip to Argentina. Ahead of boarding, I turned Tinder on, set my location to Buenos Aires and published a two-sentence description of myself as a blind Australian in town for three weeks seeking dates with local women willing to show me around their city.
The results were nothing short of amazing. By the time I arrived in Buenos Aires, I had scores of matches on Tinder and a full schedule of dates. Within 48 hours, I’d been taken for cake by a Norwegian equestrian athlete, on a tour of a wooden sailing vessel by a woman who worked for the Argentine foreign office and on a series of walking tours by Veronica, a puppeteer from the local version of the Mr Squiggle television program.
It made for a much better holiday than might otherwise be the case. When I got off my plane at the airport, I was advised that no sighted guide service was available and I would need to navigate my own way through border control. I had over-estimated how much English is spoken in Argentina – the Falklands War might have been a hint – and there’s a good chance I’d still be lost in that airport now if not for the assistance of a university student in a wheelchair who warned me that accessibility in Latin America is not the same as what I’m used to at home. Little did she know I had a cunning plan to overcome any anticipated barriers.
With the help of Veronica, I was able to explore a foreign city to a depth and diversity that I’d never been able to do before. We covered everything from grand Cathedrals, the sites of famous riots and gigs in back street bars by Spanish-speaking Nick Cave clones. True to the legends of passionate South Americans, she wept when it all came to an end and I headed back home a few weeks later.
I should say that Tinder is now all ancient history for me. I don’t even know if it still exists. My 132nd Tinder date was with Jane, my current partner and mother of our 9-year-old daughter Josie. Our foreign holidays are now largely confined to the comfort and reliability of beachside resorts. It’s nice – but not quite the grand adventure that this disabled man enjoyed back in the day.
