The fantastic life of a Blairgowrie traveller
Most people slowdown in their late seventies, but Jo Meintjes, of Blairgowrie, has a new puppy, a packed diary, and 170 countries under her belt.
At nearly 78 most people might be content to sit back and reflect on a life well-travelled.
Not Jo Meintjes. The Blairgowrie resident still runs her travel business, plays golf and croquet several times a week, tends her garden, and is kept firmly on her toes by a new springer spaniel puppy.
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Meintjes has visited 170 countries, completed overland trips from London to Johannesburg and London to Australia, sailed to Antarctica multiple times, and made roughly ten trips to various parts of the Arctic. She has stood on Tristan da Cunha, one of the most remote inhabited islands on earth, to tick off the Northern Rockhopper penguin, bringing her tally to all 17 or 18 species, depending on who is counting.
“You just have to get a special ship,” she says, with the casual ease of someone for whom extraordinary logistics have long been ordinary.
Her wildlife encounters read like a natural history wish list. She has had a mountain gorilla brush past her in what was then Zaire (Congo), come face to face with a polar bear in the high Arctic, watched Komodo dragons in Indonesia, and sat with snow monkeys in the geothermal pools of northern Japan. She has also met Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birutė Galdikas, the three women Louis Leakey sent into the field to study great apes.
It was not always a glamorous road. Meintjes grew up as a British army daughter, attending nine or ten schools before the age of ten across Germany, Cyprus, and Egypt. That restlessness planted a seed. She arrived in South Africa, started over, took a job with the Wildlife Society under the late Vincent Carruthers, and spotted an opportunity to combine her passion with purpose. Her travel business grew from there, long before the internet made any of it easier.
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Her message to anyone bitten by the travel bug is simple: Start close to home. “Go to Pilanesberg. Get your toe in the door. Once you’ve seen wild animals, it grabs you.”
Meintjes is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and joint author of The Borneo Headhunters’ Cuckoo Clock. Today, she lives in Blairgowrie with her dogs.
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