A friend of Andy Isaacson's used to ask him the same question every time he came home from a trip. What did it smell like?

Isaacson is a writer and photographer who has reported for The New York Times from every continent on earth. He has been to the South Pole and spent a month on Tristan da Cunha, the most remote inhabited island in the world. For years he fumbled the question every time it was asked.

Travel teaches us to rely on our eyes. We go sightseeing. We come home and prove the trip happened by sharing photographs. Isaacson had a camera and a career built on seeing things, and he could not say what any of it smelled like.

I heard him tell this story in May on The Daily, the New York Times podcast. I was walking the dog when it started, and somewhere in the first few minutes I stopped, found a park bench, and sat down so I could listen without distraction.

Marigolds on the Road to Agra

Isaacson booked a trip to India with Traveleyes, a British company founded in 2004 by Amar Latif, who lost his sight at eighteen and could not find a tour operator willing to take him without a caregiver. So he built one. Traveleyes groups are a mix of blind and sighted travelers who are paired off and swap partners daily, and the sighted pay their own way at a discount. In exchange, they describe what they see.

On the drive to Agra he was paired with Candie, who works in taxpayer advocacy for the Internal Revenue Service in Seattle. She told him the sights did not thrill her and asked to hear about people. Tell me what they are doing, she said, even if it is someone lying on a bench. So he looked out the bus window and described the barbers who had hung mirrors on fences and were shaving customers on low stools, the flower vendors threading marigold garlands, the lane lines everyone ignored, the snack packets strung across the front of the stands like strands of beads. The ordinary things you would walk past. Saying them out loud sharpened what he saw, he wrote. Somebody was waiting to hear it.

At the Taj Mahal, one of the blind travelers told him about the sound of the chamber. Out of all the people talking at once there is a single low pitch, close to an om. The man told Isaacson that sighted tourists would probably never hear it, because they are busy taking photographs.

Fabuloso at the Airport

Ask me what San Miguel de Allende smells like, and I can tell you. We have had a home there for nearly thirty years.

The plane touches down at León, and we close our eyes and breathe in. Fabuloso first, the purple floor cleaner they mop every terminal in Mexico with, and we look forward to it. Then the drive, and the mesquite fire somebody has going by late afternoon, tortillas coming off the press, the spice stalls in the market. The sounds do as much. Children in the public square, a mariachi group serenading a young couple, fireworks going off at all hours for reasons nobody ever explains.

Our shoulders come down before we have found the car keys, and none of it has anything to do with what the place looks like.

The Garbageman at Six

Decades of arrivals built that. The road to Agra took Isaacson one afternoon, because he had the two things that do the work. He was moving slowly, and Candie was asking.

Moving slowly is the one that comes with age, since nobody is making me be at the train station by six anymore. The other one I have to ask for.

Sit somewhere for twenty minutes on your next trip and ask whoever is with you what they smell, then tell them what you hear. Diane and I have been doing this, and it works, mostly because we notice different things.

Some mornings in San Miguel we do not have to ask. Fireworks at six that we have never understood. The garbageman striking a piece of metal to tell the street to bring the trash out. Then the fires getting going in neighboring homes as people start cooking. And all of this happens before we have even opened our eyes.