Travelling in Vietnam and Cambodia with hearing loss

Travelling abroad when you are deaf or have hearing loss can sometimes fill you with uncertainty about the new challenges you may face.

Not only are you travelling to a new country, but you have to consider adapting to a new culture, navigating a different language and other obstacles.

Our peer support volunteer, Gill, and her husband Alan travelled Vietnam and Cambodia in February and has written a blog with their top travelling tips, based on their experiences.

My top travelling tips

My fellow peer support volunteer Shona wrote about her wonderful trekking expedition to Nepal in a blog earlier this year. I have great admiration for her for not being put off by any misgivings about the possible additional challenges she might encounter because of her hearing loss, adding to the physical demands of trekking. 

My own recent travels presented no great physical demands, and I was travelling with my hearing husband, Alan, who was usually around making the communications aspect easy for me.  Alan and I, are getting close to our 80^th birthdays and are finding long-haul travel more tiring. Our four-week trip to Vietnam and Cambodia involved moving on 11 times!

Here, are some tips from my experiences which might assist others thinking about their own travels. 

Booking the trip

Our trip was put together by a travel agent, and we had the luxury of being met by an English-speaking guide at new destinations and being delivered to trains/boats/hotels without having to deal with this ourselves. If this is affordable, it is certainly worth paying for.

Vietnam and Cambodia are currently cheap destinations, and I guess that the cost of assistance of the same degree in USA, for example, might be prohibitive. 

Lipreading challenges

English-speaking guides doesn’t mean that they speak the King’s English. I had to concentrate a lot more than usual.

Local guides in Vietnam and Cambodia often dropped the final consonant of words. e.g. “fi” for “five”, “tri” for “tribe”.  There were the normal lipreading pitfalls, e.g. when I asked what the small balls in a soup were, I thought the reply was: “Beef and sweet”. Like sweet and sour pork, I’m thinking. The “sweet” turned out to be squid! 75 years of lipreading failed me there! 

Some guides were, unsurprisingly, less fluent and therefore slower to put the English words together. That gives a dilemma – do you wait for them to work out what to say, and keep watching ready to lipread, or do you look away at the scenery and risk missing something interesting that they say. 

Helpful assistive and alerting systems

When we were on group tours, the guides sometimes used a radio microphone system. These were called a Vox.

I plugged my Sarabec neck loop jack plug into the headphone/ear-bud socket and usually found this very good – the dialogue being transmitted directly into my CI processor. 

Guides on coaches using the coach microphone system I found very difficult, if not impossible, to understand – very frustrating sometimes – it’s not often possible to sit somewhere that enables lipreading. 

Google Translate, if accessible, works well as long as people are literate – there is a lot of illiteracy in Vietnam and Cambodia. You need access to wi-fi to use this.

My husband paid a small amount for a special SIM card so he could always access wi-fi. It is essential for using Google Maps too. It is possible to download some guidebooks – useful for reading up in advance, or in real time if you wish. 

For early morning alarms my Shake Awake clock was indispensable and a back-up to Alan’s phone alarm. 

It’s usually possible to enlist a willing buddy for occasions when you are on your own. Alan was unwell for part of our trip and I found that people are very willing to assist. 

Eating meals

At mealtimes, we tried to dine on our own, if I was very tired. If we must dine with others, the ideal is no more than four total.

Sometimes we had no option and tables for eight were a bit of a nightmare, but hearing people were not faring much better. 

Travelling by air

When travelling by air I always wear my sunflower lanyard. Alan normally passes on any announcements of interest, but I am aware that if there was an incident when we are not together, people will see the lanyard and know that I might have difficulty with communication. 

All in all, the trip was a wonderful experience. I hope these tips we found can help others to make the most of their travels if they have hearing loss too!

You can read Gill’s hearing loss story here.