Long before travel blogs and vlogs set off a global travel rush, Moos’ reports on her adventures to exotic corners of the world enthralled her friends and readers. “She could entertain you for hours with stories about her travels, her experiences, and the people she had met. She was great fun to talk to,” said Dr Kurush Dalal, archeologist and culinary anthropologist. “She traveled to almost every country in the world. When I last met her she had visited more than 170 countries. She was regularly traveling even that.”
In her photographs, Moos displayed her thick wad of passports, stapled with visas from all over the world, as much a part of her travel accessory as the sun hats and scarves. She had traveled to 180 countries till poor eyesight and other health conditions in her early seventies curtailed her sojourns.
Educational background of Meher Moos
She graduated in English from Mumbai’s Sophia College and earned a degree in law from Government Law College, Mumbai. Her first interest in travel was the result of a job at Air India as a flight attendant. When she was transferred to a ground job, she opted to join the airline’s tourism promotion department. Her profile in LinkedIn says that she worked in the company for over 37 years, serving in tourism offices in Europe. After retirement she worked as a travel consultant, speaker, and travel writer. She saved, sometimes wheedling out discounted and complementary tickets, and even taking loans to feed her wanderlust. She travelled alone before the solo woman traveler became a recognisable face. “She advised women to travel. She wanted Indian women to travel and see the world,” said Dalal.
She went to places not as a tourist, but as a traveler and adventurer, sampling the sights, smells, and local cuisine, never queasy or shy while sharing exotic foods with her hosts. Disregarding trends that took Indian tourists to America, England, or the ‘continent’, she traveled to Papua, Tonga, Congo, and other places that many of her countrymen had never heard of. The trip that made her famous was the one to Antarctica in 1977 when she was invited by American-Swedish explorer Lars-Eric Lindblad to join him in his expedition to the southern ice shield.
