Sir Ed’s South Pacific adventure
Sir Ed grew up in the countryside and although there were closer schools, his parents wanted him to go to Auckland Grammar, an inner city high school then regarded as the countrys best state school.
It meant four hours on a train each day.
I filled my time with reading and dreaming, he wrote in %26lsquo;Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, commenting that eventually the train became the most important part of his life.
In my imagination I constantly re-enacted heroic episodes, and I was always the hero. I died dramatically on a score of battlefields and rescued a hundred lovely maidens.
In his last year at high school he joined a school trip to Mount Ruapehu and there learnt to ski, finding his first snow intoxicating, but never looked toward the summit, believing it to be dangerous.
Tramping, followed, with Sir Ed exploring the rugged rainforest of the Waitakere Ranges between Auckland and the Tasman Sea.
In summer of 1939/40 Hillary went to Southern Alps in the South Island, dominated by Aoraki Mt Cook, at 3,754 metres, the countrys highest point.
I looked at them with a growing feeling of excitement - the great rock walls, the hanging glaciers, and the avalanche-strewn slopes.
He said he was strangely stirred.
He joined a party of mountaineers next day and climbed Mount Olivier, a modest 1933 metres whose conquest Hillary termed the happiest day I had ever spent.
With the war Sir Ed was conscripted into the air force and did his training in Marlborough that is dominated by the massive Mount Tapuaenuku, 2,885 metres, Maori for footstep of the rainbow god. Sir Ed decided he needed to climb, when training allowed. He did it by himself.
Transferred he found himself neighbours with Mount Taranaki, 2,518 metres which he climbed every weekend solo, or sometimes with fellow airmen.
Then he was sent to Suva, Fiji, which was New Zealands main flying boat base in the Pacific War. The war had moved well north and Sir Ed was attracted to a volcanic plug called Joskes Thumb.
Although known to be dangerous Hillary and a friend tried climbing it, failing on two occasions. It was only well after Everest that he got to the top of Joskes.
For a boy from isolated New Zealand there was one other big experience in Fiji.
He and a friend had gone sailing, pulling up for the night on a little island. There is met the sole occupant at the time, Muhammad Abdullah, a most impressive looking man, about forty years old with very expressive eyes and a short curly beard. During the evening I had a long talk with Muhammad about the problems in India and he expressed his belief that the conflict between the Hindus and Moslems was less a matter of religion than of economic difference.
The island was Nukulau which between 2000 and 2007 was a prison island for the convicted traitors who bought down Fijis first Indian Government.
Sent to the Solomon Islands, Sir Eds high point there was to receive a collection of New Zealand Alpine Journals - and decided he wanted to climb in the Himalayas.
War over and back in New Zealand, Hillary headed back to the Southern Alps and in 1946 he summated Aoraki Mt Cook: It meant I had achieved my first major ambition.
Then there was climbing in Austria and the Himalayas and finally to Chomolungma Goddess Mother of the World. - Everest.
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Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 6:05 pm under