Travel and the Paralympic Movement
By Jeff Burley, CTRS

Over the past six years, I have accompanied my wife during several international trips to around 20 different countries on five different continents. She lives with complete thoracic 5/6 paraplegia and utilizes a wheelchair for mobility. Without many plans, we have wandered around the globe experiencing the good, the bad, and definitely the ugly.

 
One of the best pieces of advice I can give anyone with a disability traveling to an international destination for the first time is to visit a country that has hosted a recent Paralympic Games. You may be able to have a great experience in many countries, but attitudes and access seem to be best in countries following the games, although at times the experience in any country—even your own—may not be perfect.

For a little background on what creates this trend, we only need to look at the requirements to win an Olympic/Paralympic bid. Every country has to show a plan for transportation as well as facilities to host many different sports. The great benefit for individuals with disabilities is that this design must also include access for the thousands of athletes with impairments who will come to compete in the Paralympic Games. These athletes with disabilities have to be taken into consideration as well as spectators with disabilities, creating accessible viewing areas, and the ever-so-important accessible restrooms. Often the awareness of the need to make the areas around the games accessible extends to popular tourism spots and raises awareness of access and the abilities of people with disabilities throughout the country.
   
It is not only the architecture and laws that change in these host countries, but it is the attitudinal changes that have the greatest impact. Many of the people who interact with these amazing athletes or have the opportunity to see them in action become humbled by the experience of watching them perform better than many able-bodied individuals could. There is also the pride that comes from watching their countrymen and women win medals; suddenly this individual with a disability who was their neighbor is transformed into a celebrated hero, within their community and nation wide. The connection created to these successful athletes with disabilities often changes the attitude of providing access from being a burden to something they want to do.

The Good
My wife and I visited Athens, Greece, a year after it hosted the 2004 Olympic/Paralympic games. Athens is a very old city, so we were expecting to run into several architectural impediments, especially when viewing ancient historical sites. We were actually very impressed after just our first day in Athens. We picked a hotel off of the accessible Metro in the Omonia region of central Athens, and found the downtown was very friendly to both foot and wheeling traffic. Our biggest surprise on our first day in Athens was locating the accessible lift that took us to the top of the Acropolis for FREE!! (This is a very good lesson to remember, I never pay for tickets in another country without my wife sitting in her chair next to me. There is almost always a discount or accessible pamphlet that we would have missed without her being present). Once on top of the Acropolis, the accessibility designers even installed another lift down into the souvenir shop, so we could spend money and access a super clean wheelchair-user-only bathroom. As we discussed the improvements with tour guides and access staff during our few days in Athens, we learned that many of the improvements to the city’s access were made for the 2004 Games.

The city’s design also made it very easy for my wife to maneuver around due to the wide pedestrian-only zones enabling her to cruise down the middle of busy walking streets, unfortunately also allowing her to access entirely too many expensive shops in the Plaka and other shopping districts. If you like shopping and use a wheelchair for mobility I suggest you visit accessible Athens. Upon leaving we walked the one block from our hotel in Omonia back to the very affordable Metro line that took us directly to our next stop, Pireas (the port city near Athens), and upon arrival we again learned we only had to walk one block to the Ferry Terminal. It seemed to us as though Greece was spoiling us so we would plan to return.
 
On the list of good Paralympic host cities we have visited was Barcelona, Spain. If we had visited a year after the 1992 Paralympic games, our experience would not have been that great. But the games left a legacy of change for individuals who live and visit Barcelona. When we visited Barcelona during our honeymoon in 2004, we benefited from the mistakes of the 1992 Spanish Olympic Committee, who realized they had a bit of an accessible transportation problem that required them to borrow a fleet of accessible busses from Germany to shuttle Paralympians around from venue to venue. This awareness led them to create better access throughout Barcelona, and by our visit in 2004, they estimated that 85 percent of the busses were accessible.
   

While in Barcelona, we also noticed great numbers of people with disabilities constantly out and about. It was interesting to see this too-often-invisible population everywhere. In Spain much of the success of their citizens with disabilities has to do with a strong disability organization called ONCE. We randomly arrived in Barcelona during a huge street festival and ONCE hosted a very cool block-long disability awareness obstacle course. Able-bodied people could try out wheelchairs, walkers, tandem bikes, black-out goggles, etc. This experience gave them an opportunity to understand the obstacles and difficulties people living with a disability face every day. I wanted to go through the course, but it was a popular event with at least a half-hour wait, and I had more important things to do. My wife and I were heading to a sports bar and unlike being at home in the U.S. during the Paralympic Games, there was a live broadcast of the 2004 Athens games on a regular station, in a Sportsbar!!

The Bad
Traveling in Australia, the host of the 2000 Paralympics Games in Sydney had its ups and downs. We spent a month traveling around Australia in 2006 and we discovered that the country was very open but was, at times, closed to people with disabilities. Architecturally it was a beautiful country for my wife to travel and shop in, but attitudes towards people with disabilities were prickly at times. When I called Cairns Dive Center on the phone, my euphoric feelings about the country changed a little. I figured after our successes in Sydney and on the Gold Coast, it would be easy to be up-front about our specific needs while booking a live-aboard dive trip in Cairns. I chose the “spacious” MV Kangaroo to call first, and I was actually shocked when I got the reply NO!! Even after I explained that we were PADI advanced divers and that I inspected the ship’s deck layout online finding it to be ideal for us compared to other ships we had boarded. He replied wheelchairs are just “inconvenient” on the live-aboard!!!

Not letting this deter us from our goals, I booked a live-aboard with a different company, the Atlantic Clipper (a completely non-accessible boat unless you have a human elevator with you). To ensure the reservation, we showed up without telling them about my wife’s use of a wheelchair for mobility; without so much as batting an eye, they took us on the ship like anybody else and the crew was amazingly helpful, even clearing out the only cabin on the main deck for us. The impact on other passengers on the trip can only be described as positive as well, and they were very interested in our success, and gave us the courtesy of a few more inches and minutes during our live-aboard experience. Even though we did have a negative experience or two while in Australia, it was very rare; 90 percent of our trip in Australia was amazingly accessible.

The Ugly
China is hosting the 2008 Paralympic Games; we wanted to see many of China’s historical places including The Great Wall, Yangtze River, Forbidden City, Terra Cotta Warriors, etc., and to experience life in China Pre-Paralympic Games. What we discovered in 2005 was that the architectural design for people with disabilities as well as the perceptions that the locals have of people with disabilities had a long way to go; they had a large gap to bridge in three years. Transportation was terrible; cab drivers would not even stop for us if they spotted my wife in her wheelchair. Once in a cab line-up of 40 cars, we had to walk 12 cabs deep until we found a driver willing to take us!

This continued to worsen when we went to the Great Wall. We paid extra to use a rollercoaster type ride to get us up, but they refused to allow us to enter it because of the wheelchair and then argued about giving us a refund!!! Finally I just gave up and paid another fee to enter the wall through a different gate. We just used the tried and true piggy-back up the stairs and push method to maneuver our way up the wall. It was a very happy day for me when our three week tour of China was over. I was completely tired of lifting my wife into every bus, even having to carry her to the back because people would not give up their front-row seats. It was, to say the least, a very interesting country.

Since our trip in 2005 I have learned that China is now really working on access. They have 18 inspection teams, made up of 5,000 people with and without disabilities. These teams travel around Beijing to test access and make recommendations on signage or architectural design. Also in hopes of spurring awareness in Beijing, the 16th day of every month is observed as a day of disability access promotion. I even recently heard that a German team is building an accessible lift to a section of the Great Wall. All of these benefits for people with disabilities in China and tourists with disabilities as well are happening because of the strength of the Paralympic Movement. I cannot wait to go visit this country after the 2008 games and discover how much things have changed, and hopefully I will be able to move them from ugly to good.

From our travels, we have really enjoyed the trend of countries improving access following the Paralympic Games. In traveling around the world we have discovered that architectural blocks can be overcome, but attitudinal barriers are more difficult to bear. When deciding to participate in an activity or even hiring a cab for transport, it is the limiting beliefs that others impose upon people with disabilities that create the longest lasting negative affects. When Japan hosted the 1998 Paralympics, its people relied heavily on providing customer service and the power of assisting people with positive human effort to overcome obstacles.

I would rather experience this attitude than live in a world that relied 100 percent on mechanical and architectural access. It is important to allow any person to try, or to help a person succeed; these humanistic elements create a positive impact among all involved. However, a refusal to even allow a person to try can cause irreparable consequences. We have learned on our travels that the architectural and attitudinal barriers are often decreased in countries after they have hosted a Paralympic Games, although they still may exist.

Remember to keep a smile on your face. Take heart, too, in the fact that every two years access and attitudes are improving in a new Paralympic host country.