RIP Meher Heroyce Moos

The Globe Trotter

This article was printed in the JULY SEPTEMBER 2004 edition of UpperCrust.

Meher Heroyce Moos, at 60, is energy-plus and more. In a 37-year career with Air-India that ended in 2002, she travelled to 160 countries all over the world, and now in retirement is making plans to visit the 40-odd that she has missed out. "I know that it will be impossible to see them all, but I’m hoping to visit at least 30 of them," she says with the confident air of a backpacker about to set out on another adventure. Her future plans include a trip to Greenland where she intends making an expedition with a husky dog sledge team if possible; visiting Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania; going to unusual islands in the Caribbeans like Haiti; sailing up the Orinoco River Basin in Surinam; and, seeing as many islands as possible of Micronesia. These are the islands linking the Philippines to Hawaii," says Meher Moos helpfully.

There is, about this distinguished, rosy-cheeked and salt-and-pepper haired lady, a certain determination, courage and fair amount of charm that is, well, contagious. In Bombay and in the circles that she moves around in, Meher Moos is known for her curiosity and enthusiasm for life. She is a 'people person’; she likes to connect with everyone, the ragpicker in the street to the highest in the land. “Each human being has his own stamp of dignity," she says. It is her intense and genuine love for people, and her passion for travel, that has taken Meher Moos to isolated and inaccessible areas of the world where only, perhaps, National Geographic would venture. "I find the people here more compassionate than in the cities," she admits, and I learnt some invaluable lessons, and how to love humanity, from them." And she credits her restless soul and travelling spirit to her parents who allowed her, their only child, to go to no-man’s lands. "My father was an enormous dreamer and he believed I could do anything I want because of my confidence and courage,” Meher Moos reveals.

She talks about all the unusual and exotic places she has been to in the world, listing them on the fingers of once hand, then the other, and then coming back to the first hand: The Arctic Circle; the three Laplands of Scandinavia; Antarctic - the sailing from Cape Town to Cape Horn with the famous explorer Eric Lindblad; the deep jungles of the Amazon; most of the mountain chains of the world, Andes, Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, the Alps, Atlas, Himalayas; to Macchu-Picchu in Peru; Lake Titicaca in Bolivia; the length and breadth of South America; the Caribbean Islands; across Central Asia following the Silk Route of Marco Polo; through Samarkhand and Bokhara into Siberia, Mongolia and the vast Gobi desert; China; beyond the islands of Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia; across the Dateline in Tonga: upto the shores of Easter Island; to all the Gulf countries and the Middle East; to 35 countries of Africa on a five-month solitary exploration; across all oceans and several rivers, the Amazon, Congo, Zambesi, Mississippi, Yangtze, Ganges; marching across the Sahara into the fabled Timbuktu; finding the pygmies in the dense Equatorial forests and hitting the Livingstone trail; across each and every state and territory of India including the seven North-Eastern states; and, I've even stood on the Equator at Quito in Ecuador, with one foot in the Northern Hemisphere and one foot in the Southern.

She is that kind of person. The French would say Meher Moos is full of joie de vivre. She shrugs, "I’m just mentally very strong and disciplined, otherwise I would not be able to travel the way I did. I have a goal, and that is not to travel aimlessly, I spend at least three months researching the places I intend visiting." She says she owes a huge amount of gratitude to her friend, the late Behram Contractor, who was like a kindred soul and who recognising the traveller in her, brought it out in his writings. Meher Moos, herself, has written innumerable travelogues in leading journals and has conducted educative and informative audio visual shows all over India and abroad for various institutions and educational establish her experiences. She is now looking at doing a book with Mario Miranda on travel. And something with Amar Katha for children. "Children should be encouraged and motivated to travel, they should be given the initiative,” she says.

If there is another passion that Meher Moos has that would, perhaps, rival her love for mountains, it is to do with food. And cooking and eating. There cannot be anything on Earth that she has not eaten. She is not just a gourmet, or a talented cook, but is a foodie with extremely adventurous and daring taste buds. She knows in absolute detail and has eaten the main delicacies, native fruits and vegetables of all the 160 counties she has visited. These include foods that even the most die-hard gourmets would baulk at trying. Like insects from the bark of trees in the River Amazon in Peru; monkey brain, mongoose, ant-eater and python in Cameroon; ostrich in South Africa; reindeer and snow-fed ptarmigan in Lapland; red worms in guacamole sauce, Mexico; grasshoppers, crickets in crocodile in Papua New Guinea; large field rats in Nigeria; raw beef sealed by hot spices in butter in the Ethiopian mountains. And she loves cooking, but her repertoire is limited to a few Parsi and European dishes. "I cook well. But the one thing I can’t make is desserts. So, I don't like desserts," says Meher Heroyce Moos, traveller, gourmet and perhaps India's most unusual person.

Text by Mark Manuel. 

Photograph by Farzana Contractor