On the eighth episode of Travel Tales by AFAR, season four, AFAR contributing writer Ryan Knighton steps beyond his comfort zone. As a blind man, learning to surf has meant spending most of his time surfing waves close to home in British Columbia. But recently, he decided to tackle new waves in Hawai‘i. Here’s what he found.
Transcript
Aislyn Greene, host: I’m Aislyn Greene, this is Travel Tales by AFAR. In every episode, we hear from a traveler about a trip that changed their life. Plus, this season, I’m sitting down with each storyteller to talk about life’s big travel questions. Well, I’m not really sitting down with them, because I’m recording all this from my houseboat in Sausalito, but you know what I mean.
This week, we’re heading to the island of Kaua‘i to surf with Ryan Knighton. Ryan is an AFAR contributing writer, he’s a TV writer, and author of Cockeyed: A Memoir. He has also been blind since he was in his early 20s. But that has never stopped him from exploring the world. In fact, if you’ve been a Travel Tales listener since day one, you may have heard his other travel tale about going on safari in Zimbabwe. (He may or may not have been handed elephant dung at one point.)
Ryan is also a big surfer. He’s been surfing for years near his home on Vancouver Island. He’s figured out how to navigate the waves there and has a whole community to support him. Until recently, he’d never tried surfing anywhere else. But he’d always wanted to surf in Hawai‘i, and because he’s Ryan and never met a challenge he didn’t want to try and overcome, he decided to make it happen. But this story is going to sound a little different than other Travel Tales.
As I mentioned, Ryan is a TV writer who currently writes for the show Billions, and right before we were about to record this episode, the writer’s strike ended and he was back at work. Because it’s so much more work for him to share a story (it requires him to memorize every last line), we decided to send in a faux Ryan. So at the top of the episode, you’ll hear an interview with Ryan about why he picked up surfing and how the world is different (and not) as a blind traveler. Then Andrew Galteland, who is an actor and happens to be married to our producer, Nikki, will read Ryan’s story.
Aislyn: Ryan, welcome to Travel Tales.
Ryan: Oh, it’s good to be here. It’s good to hear you.
Aislyn: Well, this story is about you learning to surf in a new place. So I’d kind of love to start with the backstory. How long have you been surfing?
Ryan: Ah, yeah, I started and so I was completely blind when I started. Blind, not blond. I have no hair. And I started in 2010 here in British Columbia. So, in 2010 in Vancouver, there was the Winter Olympics. And my wife and I were just feeling completely overwhelmed by tourists. So, we decided to go take a vacation. So, we went over to Vancouver Island, to this little town, Tofino, one of our few surfing spots on the West Coast.
There’s not many, but that’s one of them. And when we were there, you know, people were surfing and stuff, and I really wanted to do it. I wanted to try it to see if I could do it. Um, but nobody would take me out. Everyone was a little too gun-shy about it. And my wife was also like, “I don’t think you need to go out and do that.”
But I ended up coming back and trying, because I just got really curious. Because I had a friend in university who I studied philosophy with, and I’m still really close with, he’s been one of my best friends for the last 30 years. His name’s Colin Ruloff. And Colin was a pro skateboarder, but he was also deaf.
I shouldn’t say was—is. And so he had, like, no hearing in one ear, and about 10 percent in the other. So when we were students in class together, because I couldn’t see, he was like, “I’ll, I’ll tell you what’s on the board, and you tell me what he’s saying.” So we shared this, this sort of mutual way of doing work.
But he was also a surfer. And he used to come to class, this is pre-internet, and he would come with these printouts from the library of the meteorological reports out of Alaska and say, “I’ve got six hours to get to Tofino for some waves, can you do the notes today?” And he kept trying to get me to come with him, and I’m like, “Dude, I’m a blind guy, I cannot do this.”
So, fast forward to 2010, you know, 20-some odd years later, and I decided, “I’m gonna try this again.” So I called Colin, and so we went to Tofino together, and . . . the deaf guy taught the blind guy how to surf, uh, over a weekend. And it was exactly as you would imagine. I shouted at him, “What do I do now?” And he shouted, “What?” And I said, “Where are you?” And he said, “What?” And it was like a Three’s Company episode in the water. But it was two disabled guys.
Aislyn: And you survived.
Ryan: I did. I did. I paddled and I got my first little tiny wave on the inside. And stood up on an 11-foot board, which is like riding a sidewalk. And I stood up and I knew instantly this was going to be a terrible problem because I’d never felt so liberated as a blind person before. And, uh, ironically, 13 years later, I live down the road from that surf break. We built a house here and moved here.
Aislyn: What was the liberation for you? What was that feeling about?
Ryan: I mean, when you’re blind, you spend most of your mobile life on other people’s elbows. Hanging on to their elbows, being guided, or swinging a cane, or both. I don’t use a dog. But there’s always a feeling of . . . being a wagon and always following other people, and kind of giving over the independence of mobility that way for your own safety.
And I’ve said over the years that I, I actually don’t find blindness that crippling as a, as a disability. What I find most crippling is the boredom that comes with being safe. And so I, I wanted to push against that very consciously. And the idea of surfing was peculiar because I’d never considered the fact that it was a sport I could try because if I fall, I fall on water, not concrete. And I can go fast, and without anybody else guiding me, and I don’t have to worry about hitting anything. Like, it’s just wide open. So that feeling of just moving quickly, but nobody else telling me where to go, and the thrill that, “I think I’m gonna be fine, I think I won’t hit anything,” uh, it’s just kind of an addictive adrenaline rush.
It’s the way other people must feel just about running. It’s my version of running, basically. Like, I get to go quick. It’s also peculiar because I think with sighted people, surfing has this bucolic visual element. Like, you’re looking around at these beautiful landscapes that you’re in when you surf.
Like, you’re looking back at a beach, which is also a peculiar point of view on a beach. You’re looking towards the shore and coming at it, standing freely on the ocean. But I, for me, there’s none of that. What I feel is, I get driven very deep inside myself because when I pop up on a wave, it’s all about, um, feeling every small nuance of balance and the shifting power of the wave and trying to adjust my body to hang on to it.
So I actually go deeper inside, not looking outside. And it makes me just completely aware of the miracle of balance. It’s like trying to dance with a wave. It’s doing stuff that I have to react to. And other surfers look ahead and plan and attack waves and go around them and, you know, carve through them their plan of what they want to do as they see it unfolding in front of them.
And I’m the other way. I just get on and I see if I can react to everything that I encounter as long as I possibly can. And, um, it’s become my kind of peculiar addiction. And I also love it because there’s no words involved when I, when I’m up and going, which as a blind person, everything is sort of narrated to you and mediated by other people telling you stuff. It’s so nice to, to do something where there’s no words.
Aislyn: Yeah, it sounds very meditative as well, you know.
Ryan: Yeah, and terrifying.
Aislyn: Is it still terrifying for you when you go out on your own home turf?
Ryan: Oh yeah, yesterday actually, I was at a break, I don’t normally go to because my wife was doing a yoga retreat and I, I went out to the bay and I just had somebody guide me down. And I was fine on my own on the inside, you know, where the waves make sound because I could hear all that.
And so I was surfing on my own for a couple hours and I could feel the water got weirder and weirder and when you’re paddling out into the ocean and you can’t see, there is this very existential feeling like you are paddling into the void, like I have no idea what’s out there and what I’m heading towards.
But I felt the, the rip currents around me getting weird. Like I could feel the nose of my board swinging the way it shouldn’t. And it was like, “What is pulling?” And I thought, “You know what? I am probably really close to the edge of this bay or something where the rip currents pull the water out.” So I struggled to get back in and I got out of the water and I thought, “Let’s see how close I am, and see if I’m right.”
And I walked over and I was probably 10 feet away from the rocks. So if I’d actually caught a wave, I would have been thrown right into the rocks.
Aislyn: Wow, Ryan, that is intense.
Ryan: It happens sometimes. So I have to be really mindful, but at the same token, it’s like I actually got out in time because I could feel the water was behaving wrong. And is that less definite than looking at the rocks and seeing how close you are? It’s not less definite. It’s just you have to really pay attention to it in a way sighted people don’t.
Aislyn: Well, that’s a great way to segue into the story, which was you surfing totally new waves, you know, water that you didn’t necessarily have that kind of relationship with. And so you talked about being terrified, and I, one of the things that I really admire about you is that you are very honest when you’re scared or nervous, and you were honest about feeling that way in this story.
Ryan: Oh, thank you. I’m just, I’m pleased you noticed that, because I do very—I don’t try to present myself as the, um, ridiculously brave jackass character who’s like, “I’m the blind guy and I’m going to go ice climbing,” you know? I’m scared of these things.
Aislyn: Yeah, it’s so real and human, but why do you continue to do it? Why do you continue to scare yourself?
Ryan: It goes back to that, what I said at the beginning, that I am, I am actually more afraid of being bored now than I am of being scared. I’m not without caution. You know, I don’t, I don’t go into things foolheartedly and I am careful, like, I’ve surfed this break where I live for 13 years now. And I have a few spots I go to pretty much all the time. I have three or four people who work with me when I’m out there that are, you know, neighbors and friends, and I’m sort of known. And so that community makes the ocean much more safe for me.
And so, I do go when I’m terrified, but I’m much less terrified than I used to be. I’m much more comfortable. And so going to Hanalei Bay was sort of putting myself back at the very starting blocks of all this and, and saying, “OK, what happens if I go somewhere I’ve never even seen from my sighted days back when I was a teenager?”
Like, you know, sometimes there’s things in the world, at least I can get away with the fact that I have a memory of having seen it once. But I didn’t even have that. And so going out into the real, you know, capital V, Void and, and seeing what happens. And putting my trust in somebody I don’t know. Like, uh, in the article I talk about this guy, Johnny Quinn. But that’s a big thing for me, too. Cuz I’ve, I’ve been out with people who are really trying to be helpful, but actually struggle to do it. Like they’re, they can actually get in the way by being too careful with me in some ways.
It can be more complicated than that. Uh, they say too much, and I get confused, and then I get smoked by a wave, or, or whatever the case. So it is, it, just like, you know, surfing is about dancing with a wave and sort of collaborating with it, for me it’s also this weird collaborating with people I don’t know. And seeing how that relationship creates the day, the experience that I have on that wave that day.
Aislyn: You know, when we were first talking about this story a few months ago, you had mentioned that idea of, like, a good guide and what a difference a good guide can make for you while traveling. And I was just curious to know what, what is a good guide for you, aside from not talking too much?
Ryan: Oh, that’s, it’s a—I mean, this is sort of my lifelong question now. Because, you know, I’ve had amazing guides, like, you know, for the magazine, I went to Zimbabwe once, and I had a guide take me through a safari when, you know, what was the idea of an unsighted safari. And that idea of guidance was really fascinating because it was somebody who tried to build an experience for me, imagining what it might be like as a blind person in this landscape for the first time.
And so it asks a kind of very deep empathy. And, and probably more important than that, a very sharpened sense of curiosity. Because in some ways, a guide’s ability to go out into the world with you, on your footing, with equally sharpened curiosity to your kinds of experience, not just wanting to show you what they know, but trying to imagine from your point of view, what would be interesting, um, that’s the key to the whole thing. And so, for me, guidance is really fascinating as a, as a sort of travel idea, because we think of it as presenters. As sort of, uh, people who mediate our experience to a place or present a place to us. And in my sense, it’s much deeper than that. It’s more like a collaborator.
And it requires that we both come to a kind of mutual understanding of what might be a shared experience that is both new for them in a place that’s familiar to them and new for me in a place I’ve never been before. And that can be hard. For example, I’ve been places where—you know, I went to Petra once in, in Jordan for a trip, and it was kind of the least interesting part of that trip for me because there were so many sculptures that, that I kept being brought to, to feel. And even though I’m blind, just feeling sculptures doesn’t mean I kind of get anything from that. You know, just like, you know, imagine if you felt a sculpture. It’s not that different.
Aislyn: No, yeah. You’re like, “OK. That I know what the stone feels like,” but you’re not really getting the story necessarily.
Ryan: That’s right and so it’s sort of like a guide brings you to, they try to bridge you to a sighted experience. So it’s sort of like, “Here’s the lesser version of a sighted experience.” Instead of what’s a unique experience we can have together. And the best guides rethink the world they’re in through my point of view, and often it changes the way they guide other people later. Because they find there’s more things they can do that they hadn’t thought of, or there’s other things that are interesting that they just sort of overlook, because we, we give so much privilege to our eyes over our other senses.
Aislyn: It seems like part of the success of a good guide is, you know, there’s a little bit of risk there. There’s a little bit of that trust of like, you know, not coddling you, not protecting you too much from whatever you’re about to experience.
Ryan: Yes, yeah. And it’s funny, actually, I mean, my wife is probably a great example of this because she has the most experience guiding me of anybody. And we have a very specific relationship around guidance to try and make sure that my independence doesn’t get crushed, but also that I don’t get crushed in my, in my zeal to do some dumbass stuff. But, you know, like Tracy will guide me to the beach here. And, you know, it’s a totally familiar beach to me in many ways, but she still has to guide me to get there. And then, imagine this, imagine your husband of 20 years, you take him to the beach, or your partner of 20 years, you take them to the beach, and they’re blind, and you leave them there with a surfboard and say, “I’ll come back and try and find you in a couple hours.”
Aislyn: How far has she had to go to retreive you?
Ryan: She said one time it was about a half a kilometer down the beach she ended up finding me. And, and again, I mean, I’m out in the water most of the time too, so it’s also like as long as I’m back on the sand when she happens to go by. But I also consider that guidance.
That’s the funny thing. Like, Johnny was out in the water with me, calling me into the waves, and that’s a kind of guidance. But Tracy just taking me to the beach and leaving me there to surf the inside break on my own is its own guidance because it’s taking me as far as I’ve asked to go and then having the trust and the confidence—I just don’t know how she does it, to be honest. Like the idea of just walking away and saying, “I’m sure he’ll be fine or I’ll find him in a couple hours.” I don’t know how you do that. But it gives me an experience that—honestly, it’s my favorite, my favorite thing to do is to surf by myself, the smaller waves on the inside, and with no guide. They’re not the best waves, it’s not the most fun surfing. But it’s the most fun for me because I’m completely on my own, which I’m rarely in this world on my own.
Aislyn: Well, it’s incredible that you both worked that out. And I think that’s, it just sounds like a really respectful relationship. You mentioned the Zimbabwe safari and then we’ve also, you’ve gone on a lot of adventures for AFAR. We sent you to Cairo on a Spin the Globe trip. On a scale of 0 to 10, like 0 being chill and 10 being terrified, where does the surfing experience fall?
Ryan: Um, oh, that’s interesting. Uh, I would say it was about an eight before I caught my first wave. And when I caught my first wave, I was back in something that felt comfortable and familiar. And that was kind of one of the great gifts of going out with Johnny was I realized, “Oh, I’m a surfer. Like, once I’ve got a wave, I know what this feels like, I know how to do this,” even if the wave feels different, and it moves differently, and it breaks differently, or whatever. There’s something deeply familiar about it, which makes me feel comfortable.
So I’m kind of more scared before I do the thing for the first time, than while I’m doing it, often.
Aislyn: Well, it makes sense that that muscle memory would kick in, you know, it was really about learning that water and getting you into it, right? And getting you past the rip current and all those details.
Ryan: And, and also, you know, after I could see, or see [laughs], I could, I could tell how well I could work with Johnny. Cuz he was just so open and fun, and he wasn’t coddling of me. He wasn’t protecting me from things. He was really trying to push what I could experience to the limits of my skills. And having somebody do that with you is an incredible sort of offer of trust, both ways. And it doesn’t always happen. I think I said this sort of at the beginning of the article too, that my idea of a place when I travel is equally an idea of the people I interact with when I’m there. Because they, they bring me through it so they become part of the place. They become part of the character. So Johnny Quinn is my sense of Hanalei. You know, he is kind of like the character of that place to me. Because he was my Virgil who took me through it. And I, I like that part of travel. I like that the, the guidance can be—it’s not just a frame for what, for what you’re looking at. It’s not like a frame for the experience. It is part of the experience.
Aislyn: So, Nikki, our producer, her husband, Drew, is reading your story. How do you feel about hearing your story through someone else’s voice?
Ryan: Uh, I love it. I actually, I’ve done a piece years ago that was on This American Life that somebody else had recorded for me. It was like, I don’t know, maybe 15 years ago. And somebody actually came up to me not that long ago about that piece and said, “You sound different.”
Aislyn: You’re like, “Yes, I do. Very different.”
Ryan: So, uh, I don’t mind at all. I don’t mind hiding behind somebody else’s voice.
Andrew Galteland: Hanalei Bay sits on the northern shore of Kaua‘i, the fourth largest of the Hawaiian islands. Picture palm trees and lush river valleys. Wild chickens flecked with turquoise. A cobalt ocean pleated by waves. Yes, pretty as your mind’s eye can imagine. Me, I didn’t see a lick of it.
I’m a blind traveler. So my impression of a place doesn’t form from sights. Often it is given to me by somebody else, someone who knows the unique sounds, tastes, smells, and sensations specific to wherever I am. You might call her a guide. You might call him a fixer. In the case of Hanalei Bay, that someone was a surfer named Johnny Quinn.
When I asked my hotel’s concierge if she could help me find a surfing partner to be my eyes, worry was her vibe. Fair enough. I’m deeply familiar with my mellow beach back home on Vancouver Island. Still, I’ve broken ribs and ground my face along the ocean floor. I’ve torn both shoulders. I’ve been caught in rip currents and held under waves long enough to get properly spooked. Johnny, a California transplant and bartender at the hotel, had never caught waves with a blind person before. He was game. Some surfers will try anything for a thrill. Some blind folks, too.
The next day, Johnny’s truck rumbled into the parking lot of Titus Kinimaka’s Hawaiian School of Surfing to pick up our gear. The sun had barely risen, already broiling my pasty Canadian skin. Johnny was a few minutes late, and I was nervous. Frankly, I wasn’t sure how I would pull this off in a difficult bay I’ve never explored, even with his help. A surfer must visually anticipate the exact spot where a wave will break. You have to allow for changing conditions of tide, current, and wind. Keep your board and your body angled just right to the incoming swell, or the wave will jack up, tip over, and rag you around like a washing machine. It’s scary not to see what’s happening. Worse, imagine you can only be talked through it—if your head is still above water.
“Sorry I’m late,” Johnny said as he stepped out of his truck. “I walked into a cobweb and had to chase a spider with a brush. Wanna feel?”
He put my hand on his head to reveal a long, wild explosion of curls the spider had tried to homestead. The big hair matched his big baritone and broad shoulders, the kind that come from years of scratching over 10- and 20-foot swells. At least now I had an image in my mind of the man I could easily lose in the water.
Hanalei Bay is two miles wide and smiles like a crescent moon. It’s peppered with legendary surf breaks, each different in character and difficulty. Some waves rise over reef walls on the sea bottom. Others, like one called Pinetrees, groom over wedgy sandbars. And way, way out there, rolling off the eastern headland of the bay, a spot called the Point is revered for its miraculously long rights. Breaks are territorial. An extension of someone’s home. Even after eight years in Hanalei, Johnny doesn’t consider himself a local and conducts himself with deferential respect in the water. If you don’t, you might find a dead bird on your windshield (better than finding your carburetor has gone swimming).
We decided to start by the pier at the mouth of the Hanalei River. The waves would be small and gentle as they arrived from the sandbar. I could simply walk out with my board, about chest deep, and let Johnny push me into a few so he could get a feel for working with my blindness. Meanwhile, I would get a feel for how badly the sun can burn the back of my legs. I’d forgotten that, prone on the board, those would be offered up to the sky.
Right away the shallows gave Johnny pause. They were warm and dotted with tourists. I would have to somehow thread my luck between them. A surfboard fin carving through the water is like a saw. Sure, I had a shirt that warned swimmers I was blind, but if they could read the words on my chest, it was probably too late. And how would I know when to stop? Too far and I would hit the rocky shore hard.
Only way to figure it out was to try. I blew the first two waves, unable to catch them. Then another. Finally, on our fourth attempt, I popped to my feet as Johnny shouted, “Left, left, left,” his voice receding. That wave was my first glimpse, a feeling, of the bay’s magic. The unbroken wall of water felt buttery under my board, and fast. It ran silent for 10, 15, my God, 20 seconds. A surfer’s short infinity. I raced into the void and braced for impact with someone, or something. Then I heard the boil of white wash around my feet, kicked out, and a surfer hooted, “Blind guy smoked the left!”
Within seconds Johnny was next to me on his board, stoked and giddy. Proof of concept, at least in part. All we had to do was devise a system to get me out deeper, and into something bigger without Johnny’s hands able to direct my takeoff.
As water pushes into a bay, it must find its way back out. The force can carve a trench into the sand below you and create a rip current, a fast-moving channel of water that will, simply put, haul your unsuspecting ass out to sea. They terrify me. They’re silent, so I can’t hear if I’m caught in one, nor can I see or feel if I’m being dragged away. But surfers rely on rip currents to carry them into deeper water. Johnny and I weren’t sure how to handle one. He could try to call me through the rip, but if I was sucked past him, or lost his voice, I’d be in trouble. The fewer words needed, the better.
“I wish I could hang on to your elbow,” I shouted. “At least I could follow you.” Without any winning solutions, we decided to just go for it.
Not long after, I was madly paddling into the bay and lost in a rip. Johnny’s calls to, “Go left, more left, now right, straight, no, straighter,” were too overwhelming and imprecise against the speed of the ocean. Then, quite suddenly, Johnny paddled in front of me and, inching back on his board, reached his toes to the nose of mine, hooked them on, and guided me in a two-man train out to sea. Not a word was needed until we reached the break a hundred yards out. It was both genius and Herculean on his part. Safaris don’t have better guides.
The question now was how to get me into a wave. We only had words to pull it off. Johnny couldn’t stand in the water anymore and direct my board with his hands. This was the opposite challenge to the only other disabled surfer he had ever helped. She was deaf. Her ASL translator hadn’t shown up at the beach, so Johnny was left to communicate with a little lip reading and a lot of charades. But how do you shout to an inexperienced deaf surfer exactly when to pop up? As she dropped into her first wave, Johnny’s hand tapped her on the ankle to, “Jump up now, go.” He was body surfing beside her and whooping for joy, unheard. After that she would be able to see what to do.
Me, not so much.
I suggested we use a clock face to describe direction. Straight to the beach would be 12 o’clock. A left peeling wave would mean I need to aim my board like a hand at 11 o’clock. A right peeling wave, 1 o’clock. This way Johnny could simply shout what “time” I was at, and what time I wanted to be at.
The swell wasn’t too big but it was picking up. Bobbing up and down, with no fixed point in the bay to look at, motion sickness bloomed behind my eyes. A surfer swooped past doing a trick, standing on his head.
“OK, start paddling, you’re at 10, crank to 1 o’clock,” Johnny said. “This one is yours.”
I could hear a wall of water rushing at me. “But then what do I do?” I shouted, trying not to sound panicked. I’d be on my own if I caught it. Words wouldn’t carry. With only a few seconds to spare, Johnny looked ahead and divined the unfolding shape of my wave.
It would likely stand up fast and be steep, so I would have to pop up as soon as I felt it. “Lean a little on your toes when you drop to the bottom,” he said, “and go right.”
“But listen for the sound of the wave crumbling ahead of you,” he added. That, he imagined, would be my audio cue to change direction left. As soon as I felt the wave rebuilding under my tail, I’d swing my weight so that the pocket of peeling energy, where a wave curls in on itself, could catch up and slingshot me as far as possible.
I had a picture of my wave in mind. A story to follow.
“Ready to shreddy?” was Johnny’s last question, with no time to answer.
In my mind’s eye, tourists and wild chickens alike relaxed on the beach, watching waves stripe the ocean like corduroy. On one they would have spotted a blind guy exacting every move Johnny had anticipated. Finally, in a way, I could see a wave for myself, not by looking or listening, but by feeling it in my feet, a description of the water as I carved back and forth, up and down, my board like a finger on the braille of the bay.
Aislyn: That was Ryan Knighton. Ryan is fresh off his second trip to Kaua‘i to surf with Johnny, and he said it was even better this time. His kid, Charlie Rawa-Knighton, took photos, which we will share on our social media channels. So be sure to follow us. We will also link to all the stories that Ryan has written over the years for AFAR. And if you want to hear more from him, the best place to follow Ryan is on X—we’ll link to his handles in our show notes.
A very special thank you to Andrew for playing the role of Ryan. And if you want to hear more from Andrew, he and Nikki have their own podcast called Looters, a sci-fi western role-playing show that’s really fun. We’ll link to that in our show notes as well. Next week, we’ll be back with a trip to the Netherlands to follow in the steps of an obscure (but influential) Dutch art movement.
Ready for more Travel Tales? Visit afar.com/podcast, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and X. We’re @afarmedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great stories. Subscribing makes this easy! You can find Travel Tales by AFAR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. And be sure to rate and review the show. It helps us book amazing guests like the one you heard today, and it helps other travelers find it.
This has been Travel Tales, a production of AFAR Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland. Music composed and produced by Strike Audio.
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