Unpacked, Five Questions:  “The Amazon at Night Is Dolby Sound"—What It’s Like to Visit Peru as a Blind Traveler

Welcome to Unpacked: Five Questions. In honor of our latest issue of ⁠Afar magazine⁠, which focuses on epic trips—the kind of adventures that change your world—we’re hearing from the writers and photographers who chronicled and captured those trips.

In the final episode of the series, host and Afar executive editor Katherine LaGrave speaks with Ryan Knighton, a memoirist, screenwriter, surfer, and Afar contributing writer, about his first trip to Peru with Intrepid Travel.

Blind since his late teens, Ryan reflects on orchestral nights in the Amazon, the terrifying thrill of canopy rope bridges, and why tactile histories — from Incan pebble counting to khipu knot records — stayed with him long after he left Machu Picchu.

Transcript

Katherine: Welcome to Unpacked: Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. I’m Katherine LaGrave, executive editor at Afar. I’m pretty lucky: I get to brainstorm, assign, and edit features for our print magazine, and in our latest issue, we published a series of stories focused on epic trips. You know, the kind of trips that push you outside your physical and mental comfort zones. The challenging, thrilling, complicated ones.

For the next four weeks on Unpacked: Five Questions, I’ll be interviewing the writers and photographers who took and shared these trips to understand what it was like, the moments they’re still thinking about, and what they wish they’d known before their trip.

Ryan Knighton is one of those people. An Afar contributing writer, Ryan is a memoirist, screenwriter, surfer, and consultant for TV shows like Billions. Ryan is also blind, and it is largely for this reason he told me he never really had any interest in going to Peru. “What would be the point in merely listening to people look at legendary mountain views and Incan ruins?” he’d quip. But when the opportunity to join a trip to Peru with Intrepid Travel came along, he decided to open his mind and ears. Surprises of the very best kind awaited.

Hi, Ryan, so nice to be speaking with you again.

Ryan: You too.

Katherine: So this was your first trip to South America and why had you not really considered Peru before?

Ryan: It’s so great to have. Why did you not do something?

Katherine: Why did you completely rule out a country?

Ryan: I wouldn’t say I completely ruled it out. It just didn’t really…It’s one of the places that I just didn’t have a lot in my blind man’s imagination of the visual world from before I lost my sight. I just didn’t have a lot of references for it, so it never really popped up as a place I wanted to go to to fulfill some sort of exploration of something I knew like it. It sounds funny, but it’s like, you know, when I lost my sight in my late teens, it’s not like I’d seen a ton of images of a lot of South America, but I mean, Machu Picchu was kind of one of the only ones I could remember of Peru. So, yeah, it was one of those things that it wasn’t a lack of desire to go there. It was just a truly big unknown. Some places in my mind are less unknown in that way than others. Some have some sort of familiarity from my sighted days, and I feel like I’m going back in to explore the version of my memory versus what I encounter. And in Peru it was like, welcome to the blank slate. See what you discover through your remaining five senses—four senses. How many do we have? Six, five? Five? We don’t have six. We have five. What am I saying? My remaining four senses. Sorry. It’s because I’m always arguing we have six, but we don’t really.

Katherine: What would the sixth one be?

Ryan: Proprioception. The sense of how hard to push on something, say, to move it, and where your body is relative in space, like where your hands are relative to other parts of your body. That feeling. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

Katherine: Well, I could be convinced, but that sounds like—[I] mean—that sounds like a very cool topic for another podcast. But speaking of senses, and one of the things you write in the story is all of the sound, and you have some beautiful scenes. You head to the Amazon on day two of the trip and immediately, almost, you’re out walking in the rainforest without much time to adjust. What was that like?

Ryan: It was really overwhelming, particularly at night, and not in a bad way. Overwhelming in a very cool way. I’ve lived most of my life as an urban creature, less so now. One of the things that the Amazon really reminded me of is how much sound a city takes away from the natural world, and how little of the sound of the natural world creeps through a city that is dominated by tires and sirens and, you know, the sounds of a city.

But in the Amazon, I was just shocked how loud it is because, like, I live very rurally now on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and it is like a vacuum of sound here because there’s very few people around. At night, there’s just no sound out here. There’s no birds—there’s nothing. The Amazon at night is Dolby sound. It’s just, you know, between howler monkeys and insects and critters and it’s very hard to describe unless you go there, how constant the thrum of the jungle is. When you spend time sitting with it—as I did, being an insomniac who was awake during the night listening to all this—I was trying to pick out different sounds, even of the insects, because there’s just so many going on and you can identify little patterns that you missed 20 minutes ago. And it’s like, that’s the sound I hadn’t heard. Anyway, it was truly a really big buffet for the ears. Maybe in another life I would have been a biologist, because there’s always that frustration of not being able to put the name to things you’re hearing.

I love it when guides, like the guides in the Amazon that took us around, were really great in the daytime about picking out when there’d be a noise in the distance, and maybe three quarters of us didn’t notice it, but some of us did, and they would just identify what it was as we continued with whatever we were doing. I just love when the landscape around me has words given to it and the reality behind things is revealed. So it’s not just a mystery sound or a mystery sighting. The Amazon was just orchestral. It was really, I highly recommend people go listen to the Amazon sometime.

Katherine: I love that. I was there in Peru; I think you and I spoke about this before, maybe a year before you’d gone, and sort of the constant buzz—just layers. Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: Did you find that too?

Katherine: Just layers, yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: As a sighted person, was it overwhelming to you or were you able to sort of—did you have to pay attention to it?

Katherine: No. I did find it overwhelming, particularly at night when I had limitations in what I could see. But you write about some of the thumps and the things you hear, and it’s just layer upon layer of noise.

Ryan: That was the first time I’d ever heard a howler monkey in all my travels. I’d never heard one before. I didn’t know it was a howler monkey. I didn’t know that that was what was happening first thing in the morning. And I heard it and I was like, what is this? Are they tarring the roofs or something?

Katherine: It’s quite annoying.

Ryan: It’s really something.

Katherine: So the Amazon was such an epic part of the trip. You also write about experiencing Machu Picchu and walking these rope bridges in the rainforest. There are so many epic moments in the story. What is one you think about the most?

Ryan: I think about two things. One is the first time, the first step I took onto one of those rope bridges in the Amazon because it truly was like we were up 80 to 100 feet in the air. These bridges have rope railings, rope bottoms with ironwood slats across them. As I recall, they were occasionally uneven; they weren’t necessarily predictable. It wasn’t dangerous, but you had to pay attention and you could feel fraying on some of the ropes because they were old. The Amazon is constantly eating everything you try to build in it, and preserving that is something else. Those ironwood slats are incredibly sturdy.

Stepping onto that rope bridge, it swung and it bounced and I had to go alone and I couldn’t use my cane, which made me feel even more vulnerable. The advice was to lightly rest my hands on the rope and use it for guidance—but don’t grab it because you sort of collapse the structure. If you wrench it around a bunch, you can damage it. I’d been coached about it before we went up and others had crossed already, and I could hear people walking across one at a time, like, whoa!

Katherine: Which is always what you want to hear right before you do something.

Ryan: Exactly. My blind man’s mind’s eye was going: What is going on up there? What is it like? How long do we go? When I stepped on, there was that moment of trust—everybody said I could do it. We had one guide on the other end of the bridge; on my end another guide made sounds, so I had a beacon of how far I had to go and what direction. There was that moment of trust stepping on, saying, OK, I’m going to do this, and you are literally stepping into the void. Stick your foot off this platform and there will be something if you reach down a little bit. When you’re up in the trees, that feels like a big ask. That moment sticks with me a lot because it’s literally like you’re stepping off the edge of the world into something you’ve never experienced before. I’d never been through a canopy walk like that.

The other thing I think about is Machu Picchu. It’s such a bucket-list place for many people. I think about it comparable to Petra in Jordan—both are major ancient architectural sites. In my case, they were actually the least compelling part of the trip to me as a blind person because they were so visually driven, whereas that canopy walk was so sensory oriented. You’re hearing birds below you, which is odd, and swinging way up; you can hear insects more clearly than from the bottom. The smell is different up there because you’re in the canopy. It’s an atypical bucket-list experience where that canopy walk stuck out to me more than the grand, lauded Machu Picchu. It was amazing—don’t get me wrong—but as a blind person it didn’t impact me nearly as much as that canopy walk did.

Katherine: And there’s something about when we travel: We have ideas of places that inform how we experience them—our expectations. I experienced that similarly in Machu Picchu; even as a sighted person, it’s familiar because it’s so documented visually.

Ryan: There is that feeling like you’re stepping into a photograph—the image of the thing can feel more real when you get there because you’ve seen it so many times. I love going to places I have no reference for. When I went to Bhutan for the magazine, I loved going to places that my mind has little to pull from. It’s a strange experience—I’m not sure sighted people can have it as much—of stepping into an unknown world. I can’t just look things up and prepare myself, so I love that.

Katherine: Is there a moment from the trip you were particularly fond of that didn’t make it into the story? We’re trying to fit nine or so days into 2,500 words.

Ryan: Yes, there is.

Katherine: A very challenging task, but I’d love to know what’s on the cutting-room floor.

Ryan: There was one moment I tried to write about but couldn’t make fit because it slowed things down too much. It involved the Intrepid guide we were with for one day after we left Cusco. We were going from Cusco to Machu Picchu, taking a bus through the Sacred Valley to catch the train. It was a couple-hour trip and halfway through we stopped at some Incan ruins outside Cusco—maybe we spent an hour. Like many Incan ruins, it’s mostly walls you see and then imagine or extrapolate the rest. The guide explained how these walls were built. I reference in the article that the Incas didn’t have a written calculating language—no written mathematics—no calculators.

Because he knew I was coming, the guide planned to show people an image of how the Incas did mathematics, which wouldn’t help me much and was complicated to describe. So he built a little model—like an 8½-by-11 piece of cardboard with a slightly raised grid made of sticks, almost like a tic-tac-toe grid. He had little rocks and explained how the grid worked numerically, not unlike an abacus. He had me move the rocks and do calculations with him while he described it to everyone. I tried to write about it, and even as I describe it, I can’t do it very well. But if you’d been there, and you’re blind, it was amazing: Someone taught me a totally different way to do mathematics using pebbles and a grid so I didn’t have to see anything.

It was bizarre because the Incas weren’t blind, but they’d actually made a tactile system of doing mathematics using rocks and grids, moving them for categories like tens, hundreds, and thousands. That’s how they kept track of inventory while building things, or tracked food. It’s related in spirit to the way they communicated across the valley with a knot system—the quipu. They used alpaca yarn, which is everywhere (much to my wife’s joy as a knitter). Paper degrades; string is durable. They’d tie knots to symbolize different things—maybe numbers—or use colors for categories. Runners carried these strings across the valley between villages and cities. It’s a tactile system because communication is done by feeling the threads. You could see them too, but you can feel them. Like the pebble grid, it was a tactile system of recording and communicating over time and distance.

That stuck with me because it’s fascinating, a little academic and abstract. I didn’t feel it fit the article well, but personally it was mind-blowing. I’ve lamented for years that we’ve moved to screens that have lost buttons; I remember phones with buttons and I loved that world—it worked well for me. Now everything’s touch screens and the tactile dimension of how I used to manipulate my world has diminished. There’s an Incan thing I identify with and I wish we’d return to it.

Katherine: As your editor, I don’t know if it’s the easier or harder job of cutting your story down and saying no—get it to this length. What was the hardest part about writing this story?

Ryan: I find the hardest thing in this case was structuring a story based on a trip that had been planned prior to me doing it. So many of the trips I’ve done for Afar and other places have been me driving something forward once I get there, based on what I find and my curiosity. I’m building a story while I’m in it. Going on a trip with a nine-day itinerary that was already planned, along with 10 other people who have their own ideas, we covered a lot of ground between Lima and the Amazon and Cusco and Machu Picchu. You spend time getting between places because it’s the Andes—a difficult landscape with a lot of distance. The struggle for me was finding a narrative shape inside an itinerary shape. That’s always the challenge with travel writing: Is there going to be a story, not just events?

Katherine: I remember that.

Ryan: Ira Glass said years ago on This American Life that an interesting life isn’t the same thing as an interesting story. Some travel experiences have that built in: An interesting trip isn’t the same as an interesting story about a trip.

Katherine: Yes, that’s true. But in this case, I think we ended up with both, so I’m happy about that.

Ryan: That’s the work.

Katherine: What do you wish you’d known before this trip? What’s your advice for travelers who might follow in your footsteps?

Ryan: If I could do it again, I’d spend as much time in the Amazon as possible. I feel like I could have spent even longer there. That’s not to shortchange the Intrepid itinerary—there was a lot we wanted to see—but now that I know what’s there, I wish I’d spent way more time in the Amazon. I could have dug in and had an amazing experience simply in the jungle.

I wish I’d known how much distance there was between everything because, at least for me as a blind person, when I’m in a bus moving between places I’m sort of kept away from the world. I’m not hearing or smelling it—everything is just a rumor out the window. Sighted people travel differently that way; they still have an experience of Peru out the window, connecting where they were to where they’re going through the landscape and what they’re seeing—whereas I get withheld from it. It’s like I pop out of a time machine: one place, then another, and the time in between is a bus.

For me, I’d probably go to fewer places and spend longer in each. But some trips are designed to give you a sense of the variety of what’s out there. Lima is not like Cusco, and Machu Picchu is nothing like the Amazon. There are extremes in Peru—height and landscape. One day you’re up in the Andes and the next you’re down in the Amazon basin. Lima, not far south of it, is desert, and outside my hotel people are surfing. It’s hard to pick the kind of experience you want in Peru because the entire spectrum seems to be there, which this trip showed me. Now I can pick where I’d like to go back and spend longer—for me, that’s the Amazon. It was amazing.

Katherine: This was also your first group tour, and you share a bit about apprehension—how is this going to work? Give us insight into how you felt at the end of the trip and why.

Ryan: I wrote about the group-tour element because I’d never been on one before. There were about 12of us, a real mix from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Canada. My wife Tracy pointed out I’ve written a lot about guides as both a traveler and a blind person—I’m guided all the time—so I have a connoisseurship of what makes a good guide for me. When I’m traveling, guidance is a bigger idea because whoever guides me mediates my experience of that place. They become part of the place because they were the way I knew it. They told me what I wasn’t seeing and oriented me. The guide sees things and takes me over to them. In this case, it was a different idea of guidance because there was a group—it wasn’t just one person solely focused on my experience. I was in a mix with others who had their own expectations and interests. How do we collaborate to make the trip collectively satisfying? At the beginning, when people saw me sit down awkwardly with my white cane, there was trepidation—oh no, he’s going to slow us down. It’s a legitimate response: How will this work? We’re going up to Machu Picchu—will he fall off the cliff? That’ll be the end of the trip.

For me, group travel meant collaboration: Who’s going to guide Ryan today? Someone would guide me for a while and I’d chat, then someone else. I tried things like the canopy walk. I write about a hotelier, Rick, who had a fear of heights, but because I did it he decided to do it too. You start as strangers and by the end become a platoon, a tribe, or a group of friends because you’ve gone through things together no one else has. The bond gets stronger and you realize you can’t separate the group you traveled with from your experience of Peru—they are your experience of Peru as much as Peru is. That’s part of the fun of group travel: You take a gamble on how a random group will color your experience. Everyone was super helpful to me and helped me have an experience that’s not always guaranteed. Getting me through Machu Picchu for three and a half hours without falling off is an accomplishment. Everybody took turns guiding me. I have fond feelings for everyone for that reason. It was a very different idea of guidance because I’d never had a group guiding me before.

Katherine: You write beautifully about people on your trip helping open up the destination for you and vice versa. Whether it’s a group tour, traveling with someone else, friends, or family, we all affect each other’s travel experiences and what someone else does can inspire someone else. It’s a beautiful through line and connects to a bigger idea in travel that I love.

Ryan: It’s also interesting how people come on group tours with different calibrations of what they want. Some go because they’re overwhelmed by decisions—they don’t want to miss anything and want the authority of Intrepid to plan it, deliver it, and remove friction. For some people that’s important, and you can see them relax into the trip over a couple of days. Others, like me, have traveled a lot and are giving their curiosity to somebody else and letting them manage it. That meant I didn’t just notice something and wander off—this time I said, you show me stuff and I will follow. It’s a different way of traveling—not lesser, just different. I hadn’t experienced that before and it was fun to lose yourself in others’ expectations. There’s collaboration, compromise, and all that goes into group travel.

Katherine: And it turned into a fascinating story. I hope you’re happy with it as well. I realize we should have been drinking pisco sours for this.

Ryan: Pisco sours, man.

Katherine: Listener, thank you for tuning in to this special Epic Trips episode of Unpacked: Five Questions. In the show notes you’ll find a link to Ryan’s story and to his social media handles. Join me in December for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with our award‑winning features writers.

Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit Afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @AfarMedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, please subscribe and rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform—it helps other travelers find it.

This has been Unpacked: Five Questions, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Green, Nikki Galteland, and Katherine LaGrave. The podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit Airwave Media to listen and subscribe to their other shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers Podcast.