KEY POINTS:
A year after the death of Sir Edmund Hillary, former Herald reporter Adrian Blackburn looks back more than 45 years to the bright, clear day in March 1963 when he and photographer Bill Rowntree tramped into the Himalayas with a boyhood hero.
Sir Edmund Hillary stopped and pointed as we came to the top of the first 1700m-high pass, just half an hour's easy climbing from the end of the road.
"Well, that's more or less the way we're heading."
Before us, to the east, ran the line of mountains, a huge, white wall. Individual peaks jutted from its bulk to stand out sharply against the blue sky.
The Himalayan giants, although around 100km away, seemed massive, impossibly out of scale.
No handy airstrip then, close under those peaks. Instead, the nine main members of the expedition, along with a dozen high altitude climbing Sherpas, 200 porters, and various cooks and runners, faced a switchback, 16-day march.
Eleven ranges of hills and almost 260km of rough trails lay between them and their destination, Khumjung village, less than 20km from Everest.
Sir Ed, arm outstretched towards those peaks, could have been pointing not only to his past, and his triumphant ascent of Everest with Sherpa Tenzing 10 years earlier, but also to his future, inextricably linked with the welfare of the hill people of Nepal.
The wider world remembers the lanky New Zealander as the first climber to stand on the highest peak on earth.
But the state funeral with which New Zealanders honoured Sir Ed a year ago was as much a recognition of his devoted work for the Nepalis after his Everest triumph.
In March 1963 photographer Bill Rowntree and I were in Calcutta when we heard that Hillary was to follow up the 1961 building of his first schoolhouse for young Nepalis.
We were on our own world expedition: an eight-month, 40,000km drive from Sydney to Paris. But the news of Sir Ed brought an irresistible change in schedule.
We found him in the side yard of the Royal Hotel in Katmandu, amid a litter of building and climbing equipment.
Notebook and ballpoint pen tucked into his shirt pocket, Sir Ed was supervising, as from the chaos grew an ordered collection of individually numbered loads meticulously recorded on two master lists.
I was slightly apprehensive approaching this real life hero. In Wellington's Majestic Theatre a few years earlier I had listened intently as Hillary talked vividly of his Everest experience to a rapt schoolboy audience, and showed on the big screen spectacular mountain images.
But here Sir Ed proved relaxed at our approach, though perhaps a little surprised we had thought his expedition of interest enough to change our own itinerary. But, yes, no problem for us to briefly join him.
In Katmandu it had been cold and rainy. But the expedition's first day turned fine and clear. Bill and I, in our tiny Renault, followed a big truck piled high with equipment while expedition members clung precariously on top.
The vehicles jolted and rumbled along the rocky, uneven road out of Katmandu towards the end of the road at Banepa, a 30km drive.
There was a brief stop for officials to check our permits to leave the Katmandu valley and then we bounced on through rice and wheat fields, marvelling at the industry of the Nepalis in terracing even the steepest slopes for cultivation.
At Banepa the sirdar, or head Sherpa, Mingma Tsering, one side of his khaki slouch hat pinned up in Australian digger fashion, was busy matching porters to their loads. It was well over an hour before the porters were safely away on the trail and we could follow.
Ahead lay an easy first day, about 13km, to Panchkhal. With our light day packs we quickly began to pass the porters.
Among them old men and boys of 12 or 13 alike, many of them barefoot, struggled along, moving their overloaded bodies forward with short, flat-footed steps, hands up to hold in place the wide headbands balancing their 30 to 40kg loads.
They took frequent rests, choosing shaded spots on the track to lean their loads against a bank. In the sun they could not spare a hand to wipe away sweat and on the rocks of the path drying spittle glistened like snail tracks.
As we paused at the top of the pass, we could see more porters ahead, a line of lumpy figures winding slowly down the steep, rocky track.
Fields of young wheat 1000m below were a brilliant green, and a streak of light across the valley floor was the river beside which we would camp that night.
Far down the next ridge a young American, Dave Dornan, was moving fast, easily passing the trudging porters.
Sir Edmund, a beach hat protecting his face from the sun, watched the hurrying figure.
"I used to be young and fit like that," he remarked, before swinging on again his light day-pack with black umbrella strapped across the top.
But in spite of the fact, surprising to me, that he was not wearing the latest tramping boots, but old sandshoes split at the sides for comfort, Sir Ed's long, raking strides still took some keeping up with.
Soon we passed another expedition member, Bhanu Bannerjee, taking it slowly after losing two toes to frostbite in a successful climb a few months earlier.
Then, walking the opposite way, came a band of women bent low under great bundles of firewood. From them came a monotonous chant, aimed at keeping them moving at a steady pace.
But images of the past were soon blasted by a young Nepali boy walking up the track, transistor radio at full volume.
A little further on, Sir Ed pointed warningly at a trackside tap. "That's the one I got amoebic dysentery from last time."
Gradually the green valley came closer. We balanced gingerly along the narrow bank of a manmade watercourse flowing above a 15-metre drop.
Then we were walking along the edges of the padis, a final kilometre towards the night's campsite, a small area of clear, flat ground beside the river formed by the confluence of five streams in the valley.
The first loads to arrive had been stacked together and smoke was rising from two cooking fires. Flames blackened big, shining water pots, labels were ripped off new cooking gear.
Within minutes expedition members were seated in comfortable, lightweight folding chairs around a large, foldup table, ready for a mug of tea.
"It's not the kind of camping I've been used to," commented New Zealand student Jim Wilson. Dunedin engineer Murray Ellis set up a 16mm movie cameras to record "the sahibs' tea party".
"I don't expect the table to last long," said Sir Ed. "The Sherpas usually have trouble with the unfolding and kick a hole in them."
There was a slight delay with the tea until a very young bearer staggered into the campsite and a tin of milk powder was retrieved.
Brightly coloured tents went up but one, with an external aluminium frame, was hard to erect.
Jim Wilson gave up, commenting: "At least we have a representative of the firm here we can complain to."
Sir Ed, who had advised Sears Roebuck on the tent's design, simply grinned: "There's just a bit of a trick to it. " A large circular-faced butcher's scale had been suspended from a tree's branch. Each porter's load was hung from the scale's hook, its weight determining pay for the rest of the trek.
Mingma Tsering spotted a little old woman with a particularly large load. Grinning widely, he simply lifted her from the ground and put the hook through her costume.
He and Sir Ed, already clearly the good friends they would remain over many years, both laughed uproariously when the scale revealed she had been carrying well over her own body weight.
But there was no way the woman would give up that extra little bit of pay in exchange for a lighter one.
With the tents finally up, air beds were inflated and sleeping bags unrolled. Expedition members retired to shelters to put plasters on blisters or write up diaries in the remaining light.
But the need to execute four bantam hens for dinner prompted another small delay. Sherpas, devout Buddhists, do not kill. Finally an irreligious porter of Mongoloian appearance solved the problem with a giant, curved knife drawn from a sheath strapped across his stomach.
Dr Phil Houghton, one of two Auckland doctors with the expedition, dressed Bhanu Bannerjee's toes, now very painful. But Bhanu was determined to continue, "even if I have to drag myself the rest of the way".
The porters built their own small fires nearby, cooking rice in battered, blackened pots before spreading blankets on the ground, ready for sleep.
Dinner in the big mess tent was giant servings of rice, cauliflower, chicken and potatoes in a delicious thin stew. Biscuits and yet more tea followed.
Jim Wilson learned the Nepali phrase for "good work" and went outside to pass the message on to the cook, as the rest of us chatted.
A torch bobbed in the darkness as rearguard expedition member Desmond Doig walked into camp bringing late mail from the Nepali capital.
A full moon rose swiftly above the dark hills rimming the valley, the stars seeming impossibly bright. But in camp after dark all there is to do is sleep. So sleep came, to a low sound of singing and intermittent sharp throat-clearing and coughs from the porters, huddled on ground already wet with dew.
In the morning half-light the first porters were heading off into slowly-lifting mist as the "sahibs" gulped hot tea and the tents collapsed like parachutes come to earth.
"It's been a perfect start," said Sir Ed, as we exchanged handshakes. Then, as the sun's first glaring arc edged above the hills, he turned towards it to continue the long march.
It was hard to resist following.
