Blairgowrie resident’s world travels
Most people slow down in their late seventies. Jo Meintjes, of Blairgowrie, has a new puppy, a packed diary, and 170 countries under her belt.
At 78, Jo Meintjes has no intention of slowing down.
The Blairgowrie resident still runs her own travel business, plays golf croquet several times a week, tends her garden, and is currently navigating life with a boisterous new springer spaniel puppy.
The numbers alone tell a remarkable story. Meintjes has travelled to 170 countries, completed overland journeys from London to Johannesburg and London to Australia, and made roughly ten expeditions to various parts of the Arctic. She has sailed to Antarctica multiple times and once set foot on Tristan da Cunha, one of the most remote inhabited islands on the planet, specifically to spot the Northern Rockhopper penguin. That sighting completed her collection of all 17 or 18 penguin species, depending on which taxonomy you follow.
Read more: The fantastic life of a Blairgowrie traveller
“You just have to get a special ship,” she says, with the ease of someone for whom extraordinary logistics are simply part of the job.
Her wildlife encounters are the stuff of natural history dreams. A mountain gorilla brushed past her in what was then Zaire, she has stood face to face with a polar bear in the high Arctic, watched komodo dragons on the islands of Indonesia, and sat alongside snow monkeys soaking in the geothermal pools of northern Japan. She has also met all three of the women Louis Leakey sent into the field to study great apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas.
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The road to this life was not always smooth. Raised as a British army daughter, Meintjes attended nine or ten schools before the age of ten, moving across Germany, Cyprus, and Egypt. That itinerant childhood left her with a restlessness she never outgrew. When she arrived in South Africa, she started fresh, took a job with the Wildlife Society under Vincent Carruthers, and gradually found a way to turn her passion into a career. Her travel business grew from there, well before the internet made such things straightforward.
Her advice to aspiring adventurers is refreshingly grounded. “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 Borneo Headhunters’ Cuckoo Clock. She lives in Blairgowrie with her dogs.
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