mbamps

Great trip report! Well done for not giving up!

Tintin_on_the_road

Fabulous TR! Love your style, so captivating! And not missing the pics at all, so don't worry about them! ^

fieldeng

Sent you a PM..

restlessinRNO

jenpdx - It is a pleasure reading your TR. Inspiring. I love your writing style, and look forward to further installments.

InsaneTravel

I'm really enjoying your TR Jenpdx; it's a refreshing change and you are an AMAZING WRITER....

You should travel the world and blog about it , oh wait, that's what you are doing ;-)

Please post more, we are all waiting with anticipation.

jenpdx

Hong Kong International Airport

The plane arrives at the gate and we wait for the Quickie while the other passengers start disembarking. It spent the trip in the belly of the plane, wrapped in a plastic cover (this is a Cathay specialty; US airlines are not so cautious and the Quickie has suffered numerous scratches in its travel career, usually induced by careless or lazy staff who toss it around, unaware that it’s a $5,000 piece of equipment that is my ticket to independence). Sometimes it takes a long time for it to arrive, but today, it shows up almost immediately, but as is standard procedure it is delivered to the second (economy) door. A member of the ground staff sprints back there and transports it to the front door, and the flight attendants stop the stream of economy passengers passing through the premium cabin so we can leave. How cool is that, I’m not the last person off the plane for once! My boyfriend grabs me and we are on our way. A few feet into the terminal, we are stopped by a wheelchair pusher, who, assisted by 2 or 3 Cathay employees, only agrees to letting us leave unattended if we sign a release form stating that we reject the service. Cathay and their forms!

As we get to the arrivals hall it suddenly it dawns on me why I’ve been brought on this trip. Instead of queuing in a looooong line, we head straight to a priority immigration line for wheelchair users, and we arrive at baggage claim long before the luggage (and most passengers) show up. We collect our luggage and head to the taxi rank, where we are met with some hesitation. I don’t speak Cantonese, so I have no idea what they are saying, but it sounds as though the driver argues with the taxi rank captain that there’s no space for our suitcases and the Quickie. It’s not the prettiest language in the world, and for all I know they might be talking about beautiful shared memories from their children’s graduation ceremony, but they do appear a bit befuddled. They don’t speak English well enough to understand that the Quickie can be taken apart, and there’s no way to demonstrate with me in it. So my boyfriend takes the initiative and lifts me into the cab. Then, he takes the Quickie apart, and there’s big relief when they figure out that we are pros at this. Off we go with suitcases in the trunk and Quickie on the seat next to the driver.

Intercontinental Hong Kong

Choosing a hotel can be a nightmare. Not so much because of accessibility stuff, but because my boyfriend travels a lot for work and has status with Intercontinental, Hyatt, SPG and HHonors. In Hong Kong, that gives you a lot of options. Which is unfortunate because in advance of this trip I had to listen to a lot of back-and-forth about hotels. Do you prefer view or location? Or a good club lounge? Yes, lounge. But that’s up a hill, not good with the Quickie. Ok, view then. No availability on points. Location? No accessible rooms. I love that he’s trying to get everything perfect, but the process is exhausting.

Most hotels in Hong Kong have no or very few accessible rooms, and what little there is is usually in one of the less desirable categories, namely Deluxe Refuse Collection Area View. In the US, hotels are required by law to have accessible rooms spread across various categories, so they can’t get away with having nothing but dumpster views. In Hong Kong, not so much. The Sheraton doesn’t have any accessible rooms at all. The Conrad, Grand Hyatt, and IC each have two, and the recently opened W has eight.

Our first choice is the IC. The main reason for staying there is the view. It’s built directly into Victoria Harbour and has a million dollar view of the Hong Kong skyline. But as you’d expect, the accessible rooms face the back and have a view of a construction site. We have Royal Ambassador status and are guaranteed a (junior) suite upgrade, and the accessible rooms aren’t anything fancy. In email negotiations prior to arrival, the hotel offered free club access if we take the accessible room instead of a suite. But of course we want the view, which means that the room won’t have any accessibility features and my boyfriend has to help me a lot. The compromise after long discussions is that we spend the first two nights at the IC and then move to the W, which has plenty of accessible rooms and is located with easy access to transportation.

When the cab pulls up to the IC, two bellmen rush over and open the doors for us. As my boyfriend takes his sweet time to pay the driver, they grow increasingly confused why I’m not getting out. This happens a lot, but fortunately it never happens more than once at any given place. We stand out, and people immediately start recognizing us. You wouldn’t believe how often each of us get asked, when out in public alone, “where’s your boy/girlfriend?” People I have no recollection of ever seeing recognize me and associate me with my boyfriend. Baristas at Starbucks, strangers on the street, even a PDX TSA supervisor when I recently flew solo to visit my parents (“where’s your counterpart?”). When we were departing Kauai a couple of months ago, a couple of strangers waved at us at the airport and said, we saw you at the Grand Hyatt, you’re such a cute couple! At hotels, this notoriety can work in our favor. Everybody knows us, and we generally are well cared for.

But it’s not all sunshine, and we’ve had our share of abysmal hotel experiences. For instance, we stayed at the Grand Wailea in Maui last year, and they gave us an “accessible” room that wasn’t really accessible. It had a regular size toilet stall equipped with grab bars, but it was way too narrow and there was no way I could roll in. When we asked for a different room, they told us, they’re all like that, nothing we can do. I’m sure they’d tell their able-bodied guests, tough luck, use the toilet in the lobby or find someone to carry you if you want to use the one in your room. When we talked to the manager, his response was, hey, we have annual ADA inspections and they don’t complain. That’s an extreme case, but there’s often something amiss with hotels. You learn to live with it.

On the other hand, we often get amazing treatment. Some hotels in the US have an accessible version of all room types, including their better suites. It helps to tell them at check-in, “we’re hoping to get something a little better; most hotels only have accessible rooms with parking lot views.” Often the response is, oh no, we have suites, let me see if I can find you one. Last year, we spent two weeks in an accessible St Regis suite at the Princeville property, which normally tries to charge even for upgrades to junior suites. If a front desk person doesn’t budge on a higher level accessible room, my boyfriend often asks, “can you look for a non-accessible room? I’ll have to carry her, but it’s worth it if it has a nice view.” And often, a nice room appears out of nowhere. Now, I won’t make you salivate more, but I’m sure you’ll be excited to hear about my upcoming business venture, an agency connecting disabled people to upgrade seekers and status junkies worldwide.

Back at IC Hong Kong, we roll up to the front desk. The counter is a couple of feet above my eye level, but it doesn’t matter much because an employee whisks us to our room for check-in. It’s a weird experience because she completely ignores me. This is unusual. What is usual is that people will talk to my boyfriend instead of me (“what can we get her to drink”); he usually responds by saying, “why don’t you ask her?” We take the elevator to our floor and then roll to the room, my boyfriend holding my hand and pulling me while the IC person acts like I’m not there and tries to make small talk with my boyfriend. Not a great start to our stay. What’s worse, they have what we dubbed “casino carpet,” really thick carpet with enormous friction that makes it very hard to maneuver the Quickie. My boyfriend pulls me for a little bit, but then I have to let go of his hand because my arm is about to fall off.

The room is amazing. It’s a junior suite of modest size, but the view is breathtaking. A full panorama of the harbor and Hong Kong skyline. Because the hotel is built directly into the harbor, it feels a bit as though we’re on a cruise ship. It’s so close to the water, it feels like you could grab the Star Ferry and all the barges going by. Very cool!

Accessibility-wise, the bedroom isn’t bad. I can get to the bed, and the desk and all major features (phone, TV) are accessible. As is the most important feature, the minibar, which is free for Royal Ambassadors. It’s an amazingly well-stocked minibar; what a shame we don’t drink alcohol. One of the cruel jokes of paralysis is that although I don’t have any movement or sensation below my level of injury, I have constant neuropathic pain, caused by nerve endings in my damaged spinal cord misfiring and transmitting wrong information to my brain. The pain ranges from annoying (constant tingling in my legs) to unbearable (my legs feel like they are on fire and I have sharp pains shooting throughout my lower body). To control the pain, I take a colorful array of prescription drugs, which don’t mix well with alcohol. As for my boyfriend, it’s not a good idea to get drunk when lifting fragile goods (i.e., me). Later that day, the hotel is kind enough to take out some beer cans and replace them with extra cranberry and orange juice. They don’t remove something called Pocari Sweat (I hope they didn’t pay the participants of that focus group! Which one’s it gonna be, Pocari Sweat or Vomit Water?), and my boyfriend keeps pestering me to try it. It turns out the name is an apt choice. As would have been Vomit Water.

But I digress. You’re here to hear about accessibility, not soft drinks. The bathroom is pretty challenging. The toilet stall is very narrow, so my boyfriend has to carry me. That’s not a big deal under normal conditions (although I might be at 93 pounds now owing to the Cathay chocolates), but because it’s so narrow, he can’t use proper lifting technique but instead has to lift with his back. The main bathroom has a lot of maneuvering space, but there’s a fuzzy mat on the floor, even worse than casino carpet. I can barely move on it, and every time I turn, it starts moving until it’s all bunched up. My boyfriend rolls it up and puts it in the closet, but housekeeping brings it back every time they come in.

Here’s our pop quiz for the day: How does a paralyzed person shower? Now, if you live in a large urban area and take public transportation, you may think there’s an obvious answer: Not at all. Every city has a smelly older guy in a wheelchair riding the bus all day long. I know. I have met him. You think you have it bad when you get a whiff of his scent, but consider this: He thinks because we’re both in chairs we have a special bond, and he rolls over and talks to me. “How long ya been in that chair?” “Four years.” “Four years, that’s nothing! I’m going on 35!” Umm, ya, and when did they tell you that you could stop showering? Anyway, some of us do shower. Most of us, probably. Not standing up, of course. There’s an assistive device called “shower chair,” which is just that, a waterproof chair that goes in the shower. I can roll up next to it and transfer on. In accessible hotel rooms, these things are sometimes installed permanently (attached to the wall), and sometimes you have to call housekeeping to bring one. You have to be lucky to get someone on the phone who knows what you’re talking about, and indeed many hotels don’t have them at all, even in the US, where they are required by law. In Hong Kong and everywhere else where there isn’t a law, the odds are not in your favor. My boyfriend calls, not expecting much, and after some explanations of what we’re looking for it turns out that they don’t have a shower chair. It’s really not a big deal; when it’s time to shower, my boyfriend pads the bathtub with extra towels (to protect my skin) and lifts me in. It’s not an easy feat because he has to get over a big step and there’s nothing to hold on to. But we’re used to this, and fortunately nothing bad has ever happened. Knock on wood!

We crash out for a bit, and soon what my boyfriend has termed the “IC Hong Kong routine” sets in. The view is so spectacular and the bed so comfy, why head out at all?

Out and About in Hong Kong (Part 1)

But we do head out. The IC entrance is a couple of stories above street level, and a steep driveway leads down to Salisbury Road. It’s mostly for car traffic, but a small portion on the side is partitioned off for pedestrians, and essentially forms a steep ramp. A number of staff are guarding this ramp, presumably to keep (litigious American?) guests from getting hit by trucks entering the adjacent construction site. They spot us and rush over to help, but they seem to be unsure what assistance they should provide. I’m glad they don’t have more training; if they did, they’d probably run into the problem that throws off TSA: Quickie has no handles. The best thing to do (and they figure this out quickly) is to get out of the way and hope for the best. At the bottom of the ramp the regular pathway is blocked due construction, and we have to go down a big step. There are two ways to do that, the textbook and the suicidal way. The textbook (or rather: Quickie manual) way is to turn around and have someone, ideally several people, hold on to the Quickie and slowly ease it down, back wheels first. Nobody does it this way, because the suicidal way is so much more fun. Maybe 10 feet before the drop, you accelerate and then, on the top of the step, lean back, popping a wheelie and (hopefully) landing on the back wheels. It takes some training and doesn’t always work. I’ve fallen out of the Quickie a few times. It’s an interesting experience because you get to crawl around on the floor and try to get back up (bonus if there are lots of bystanders around who are on their cellphones and say omigod, there’s a girl here who just fell out of her wheelchair), and then spend a few days wondering whether you broke anything. Today, no problems at all, which I’m sure is appreciated by my IC watchers.

On our first -and by now very partial- day, we don’t have big plans. We want to take the Star Ferry over to Central and go shopping. The ferry terminal is a leisurely 10-minute walk from the IC, and there aren’t any major obstacles. The ferry terminal is old and not at all accessible. The ferry has an upper and a lower deck, and you have to walk stairs to get to the upper deck. It’s also a few cents more expensive. There are signs all over, wheelchair users lower deck only, contact staff. The woman manning the turnstiles is very helpful, and insists on breaking a HK$100 bill so we can buy a token instead of using our Octopus stored value cards, “so you can enjoy discount.” Disabled people can save HK$.60 (US$.08) off the HK$2.00 (US$.25) fare, and who’d pass on that, especially if it only comes at the cost of missing a ferry and ending up with a pocketful of change, specifically HK$98.60 in mostly HK$2 and HK$5 coins?

The next ferry arrives quickly, and we start looking for the pre-boarding line. Except there isn’t one. It’s a brutal free-for-all, reminiscent of the boarding process Air France uses in Paris. Everybody pushes and shoves to the boarding gate, and the best we can do is to stay holed up in a corner until the masses have passed through. Trouble is, at that time, a chime goes off indicating that the ship is about to leave. There’s a very steep ramp down to the boarding level, and a Star Ferry employee motions to hurry up. We go as fast as possible, but this is pretty dangerous. When we get to the boarding platform, the ferry rolls violently and the gangplank moves up and down, bouncing as high as maybe a foot in the air. A recording plays, “beware of moving gangplank.” No sh*t! Two Star Ferry staff grab the Quickie and pull me on board. Scary!

The ferry has two spots marked “Wheelchair User Private Space,” conveniently located right next to the engine room. Instead of going there, we park on the starboard side and enjoy the view. The water is rough, and I can’t balance out the rolling. I hold on to the railing and hope for the best. Fortunately the trip only takes a few minutes. We wait until everybody has disembarked, and then cautiously wheel –backwards, employing the “textbook” technique- off the ferry. By the time we’re off, the boarding gate has been open for a while, and the Tsim Sha Tsui bound crowd is pushing past us.

We take the elevator up to the covered walkway that leads toward the IFC and Central. Once we get past Connaught Road we decide it’s time to head to ground level. There are no signs pointing to elevators, so we head into one of the buildings to find a way down. Some of these buildings are older and quite obviously weren’t constructed with accessibility in mind. We find a bank of elevators, but they all go up. A guard directs us to an elevator that goes down, however, as we soon find out, not to street level, but a bit below. We soon find ourselves deep below the surface, and only make it back to daylight thanks to the intervention of a helpful janitor, who uses his keys to unlock a service elevator. Phew!

We spend a couple of hours exploring Central. The streets are very busy here, but miraculously nobody runs into me. Most of the stores don’t have no-step entrances, but as long as it’s just a single step, I can handle it. After a while, I figure it out; stores that sell clothing or other junk I don’t need are fairly easy to access. Drugstores, convenience stores, and the like often have 4-5 steps and are off limits, and most of the stores that offer basic necessities (e.g., groceries) are in basements and have stairs.

Much of Hong Kong is very hilly, and anything beyond Queen’s Road (including the Mid-Levels Escalators) is basically off-limits. I could get there via a cab if I had a particular destination in mind, but just rolling around for fun doesn’t make sense. We decide to head back to the IFC Mall, and try to find a building that has an elevator to get us back to the elevated walkway. First, we take an elevator to a bank branch that’s a half floor below the walkway. Then, we head back down and find another set of elevators, but they don’t stop on the floor we need. Turns out the floors of this building aren’t aligned with the walkway, so we have to get out on a “half” floor. A guard calls someone, who shows up with a key that allows them to override the elevator, and get us out on the desired floor. As we arrive on the walkway, the guard bids goodbye, and we realize just in time before he takes off that there are steps between the walkway we’re on and the walkway that goes toward the IFC. The guard summons someone else, who has a key to activate a platform lift that transports me to the lower level walkway. Total time elapsed for covering the 300 feet to the IFC: 25 minutes. Now, it’s probably this bad only because we’re tourists who have no idea what we’re doing, and because we had bad luck. If I lived here, I’m sure I would have optimized our route. We spend a bit of time at the IFC Mall, and then take the Star Ferry back home and go to bed quickly. So jetlagged!

JMN57

We go to places around the world to see them firsthand. We read these TR's to glimpse of places we have not yet been.

Yours is different. Yes, set in travel but so much more. It is vivid, compelling and expanding. It gives us a glimpse of the challenges you face and, even more, the spirit you bring to the task. Brava!

Thank you for sharing - we await more.

bowdenj

Such a hilarious line!!!!

wrp96

What? You don't enjoy the Deluxe Refuse Collection Area View rooms? I guess those aren't any better than the Superior Air Conditioning View rooms my family members seem to get.

Love your style of writing. It's fantastic.

DeafFlyer

I just read this thread for the first time. I've been through most of what you wrote about. I've been a wheelchair user for 13 years now. You write very well. The one part of your posts I'm intrigued about is the part about your Roho cushion and TSA. They have never asked to run mine through the X-ray machine, or at least I never heard them ask (check my screen name). I can not get up so they can take it out and put it in the machine. How did they get it from you? Did you have to transfer to some other seat? For me, it is just about impossible to get my Roho out from under me. I'm wondering if some TSA agent somewhere will say that I can't fly because they can't scan my Roho? It hasn't happened yet, but could it happen, in your opinion?

jenpdx

You guys scored an upgrade!

I have read some of your other posts and I know you travel a lot, so you have probably seen as much dumb TSA stuff as have I. So if you ask, could it happen, I have to say, anything can happen when TSA is involved. But is it likely to happen? Not at all IMHO. If an agent asks, you should insist that you can not, under any circumstances, get out of your chair. If necessary, ask for a supervisor or even escalate further (check the TSA forum for the exact job titles of these people; I think the top boss is called FSD, Federal Security Director). You can also ask for someone from the airline to be present. TSA has absolutely no business taking your equipment apart; problem is, if they make up their mind and you refuse, they'll believe you're hiding Osama's ashes in the ROHO.

When they x-rayed my ROHO, they asked me if I could transfer onto a chair, and I (stupidly) said yes. I would guess that with your hearing impairment this situation wouldn't even have come up, because they couldn't have communicated their unusual request. This was a bad idea on so many levels, because the chairs they have aren't particularly safe for transfers (nothing to hold on to, etc). Say, no, I can't move, and I have to sit on this. There's nothing to be gained from giving in to their requests, but there are many things that can go wrong (fall off the chair, damage your skin during a bad transfer, they break the ROHO, etc). Stand your ground and don't worry too much!

DeafFlyer

Thanks for the response. I've traveled to Europe, and done some domestic flights, but I don't fly as often as I want to. If I flew often then I probably wouldn't need to ask. I really enjoyed these trip reports. Keep 'em coming! ^

javaman47

Great trip report! Your writing style is so descriptive and engaging! Look forward to future installments.

aleksir

Great report Can't wait to see the next installment.

aafreq

Thank you for your unique perspective !
I traved with my Mother for her one last look at
Her farm and home which were taken from her and
Her Family by the soviets. and no we are not Jewish.
It happened to everyone....
I even had fashioned a luggage carrier that slid in on
Both sides of her wheelchair thereby allowing me alone to
Transport her myself and two bags all together.
While service for the disabled were paltry in the US I found the
Service in Germany to be exemplary. A small van pulled up to
To The aircraft and by a side door with a small lift transported
Both of us to the 'in transit' lounge where we were to board
Our continuing flight. This.bit of kindness has never been forgotten.
I look forward to your continuing saga. Now that I myself face
Traveling challenges due to disabilities. None fortunately as serious as yours