Meher Moos is known as India's intrepid travller. She joined Air India in 1965 as an air hostess and retired in December 2002 as a Senior Executive Officer. She is presently serving as an International Travel Consultant to Thomas Cook.
A deep interest in anthropology and her abiding love for meeting people and seeing places, has found ample fulfillment during her extensive travels to over a 150 countries of the world. Crossing the Arctic Circle in 1972, she visited the 3 Laplands of Scandinavia and in 1976 participated in an exciting expedition right up to the Antarctic Continent on board the famous liner “Lindblad Explorer” sailing from Cape Town to Cape Horn – visiting isolated Antarctic scientific & meteorological bases in an ocean packed with ice shelves & glacial mountains.
Other adventurous jaunts took her from the deep jungles of the Amazon to the heart of the Andes – to Macchu-Picchu in Peru, which was the Lost Land of the Inca Kings, onto Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, later covering the length and breadth of South America. She has also back packed exhaustively, all over the seven Central American Republics and visited many Carribean Islands. In 1975, she traversed right across Central Asia following the ancient Silk Route of Marco Polo, through Samarkhand and Bokhara into Siberia, Mongolia and even the vast Gobi desert : and, in 1978 again sailed from Yokohama to Shanghai, touring China extensively. Her travels through the Orient and Far East, continued well beyond familiar cities into the remotest islands of Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia scattered all over the South Pacific – crossing the International Dateline in Tonga, right up to the shores of Easter Island with her strange huge stone gods. Her travels have taken her to all of the Gulf Countries and most of the Middle East as well.
In 1981 she embarked on a 5 month solitary exploration of over 35 countries in Africa – bent on discovering forbidden and inaccessible interiors – marching across the Sahara to fabled Timboctou – home of the Tuaregs – then learning to live with the Pygmies in the dense Equatorial forests and finally hitting the Livingstone Trail. It was a veritable odyssey demanding exceptional endurance and her success story has been amply splashed by the media and television worldwide.
Her early schooling was done in St. Joseph’s Convent, Panchgani and later she appeared for her B.A. (Hons.) from Sophia College, Bombay and for her LL.B. from the Government Law College. She has been a regular speaker on All India Radio and has given many press and TV interviews. Her travel feats have won her many laurels and medals – and as a recognition of “her tremendous courage and exemplary initiative”, the Indian Jaycees selected her for the meritorious award – ‘The most outstanding person of India’, in 1980.
However, her most significant and lasting contribution has been her vivid travelogues in leading journals and her educative and informative audio-visual shows.
No comments:
Post a Comment