KEY POINTS:
There was no central heating when Sir Edmund Hillary spent his first night in Antarctica 50 years ago.
So today, as the 87-year-old adventurer returns to the frozen continent for what may be the last time, he has just one request: to spend at least one night away from the climate-controlled comfort of New Zealand's Scott Base, sleeping in the simplest of shacks, a basic A-frame hut on the ice in the shadow of Mt Erebus.
"I just enjoy the beauty of the area, looking at the mountains across McMurdo Sound; it's really magnificent," Sir Ed told the Herald on the eve of his departure from Christchurch.
"[Scott Base] has become much more sophisticated ... it's not the simple little bundle of shacks that we had, but you know, we were very comfortable.
"I never heard any of our 23 people who wintered over complain about discomfort. We had a good time, and we had good weather, but now it's all exploded really - it's a great place."
When Sir Ed and his party founded Scott Base in January 1957, they were supposed to be setting up food and fuel depots for British explorer Vivian Fuchs, who was attemptingto be the first man to crossthe Antarctic overland.
Instead, Sir Ed took his fleet of Massey Ferguson tractors all the way to the South Pole, beating Fuchs by 17 days. News pictures show the pair standing with awkward half-smiles on the day Fuchs finally made it to the pole.
On this visit, Sir Ed and Prime Minister Helen Clark will preside over a flag-raising ceremony at the pole, on January 20, to mark the anniversary, as well as launching an Antarctic Youth Ambassador programme and commemorative stamps and promoting the beginning of the International Polar Year.
Accompanied by his son-in-law David Hayman and Dr John McCartie, Sir Ed knows it may not be possible to return to the ice again.
"He just wants to soak up the atmosphere of probably being on the base for the last time," said Antarctica New Zealand chief executive Lou Sanson. "Everyone on the base has to wash up their own dishes, but we might make an exception for Sir Ed this time."
He will be aided in walking at all times by Mr Hayman and Dr McCartie, one man holding each arm.
"I'm looking forward very much to going back and seeing the vast improvements that have taken place at Scott Base," Sir Ed said.
The story of that 1957 expedition says much about the character of Edmund Hillary; he was never simply going to be support crew for another adventurer and rolled his Fergusons straight over the outraged sputterings of organisers, who felt he should defer to Fuchs.
So it is interesting to learn that Sir Ed's hero is not Robert Falcon Scott, the straight-bat British officer after whom the New Zealand base is named (Scott and all his party died of starvation after being beaten to the Pole in 1911 by Norwegian Roald Amundsen). Instead, Sir Ed identifies with the boisterous egalitarianism of Scott's great rival Ernest Shackleton, who twice survived appalling hardship to rescue all his men from death on polar journeys.
"Shackleton was undoubtedly my heroic figure," said Sir Ed. "I don't quite know entirely why, except that in a little way I felt I had attitudes which were very similar to Shackleton's, whereas Scott's more formal approach to his expedition was very different."
