My homeland has never been a place for anyone to put on airs, but Sir Edmund epitomised the selfeffacing, quintessential Kiwi - just like my other boyhood hero, Captain Charles Hazlett Upham, still the only combat soldier ever to win the Victoria Cross and Bar.

One of my earliest memories was listening to a crackling wireless broadcast of the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and hearing the stunning announcement that the tall, long-jawed mountaineer and his sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, had climbed the world's highest mountain.

From then on, it seemed we all grew up with Sir Edmund as our role model. For a tiny country at the end of the earth, he was a source of national pride unlike any other - a beekeeper who found his true calling in the lonely challenge of the mountains and, in doing so, passed into legend.

It wasn't just my countrymen who idolised him. 'In this age of hyperbole we've long since devalued the term 'hero', but Hillary has been my great hero for five-and-a- half decades...and for a great many of our generation,' a hard-bitten Australian friend e-mailed me. 'I will truly miss him and everything noble he has represented in life.'

While he may have 'knocked the bastard off', the now-famous expression he used for conquering Everest, that and Sir Edmund's other exploits - leading the first vehicle expedition to the South Pole and exploring the source of the Ganges - were matched by his philanthropy and his life-long dedication to the welfare of the sherpas.

It was not without cost. The explorer's wife and daughter were killed in a plane crash in 1975 soon after taking off from Kathmandu to join Sir Edmund at the mountain village of Paphlu, where he was building a hospital.

Sir Edmund himself seemed to recognise his place in the Kiwi lexicon. 'In some ways I epitomise the average New Zealander,' he said in one interview. 'I have modest abilities, I combine these with a good deal of determination, and I rather like to succeed.

'I was just an average bloke; it was the media that transformed me into an historic figure. And try as I did, there was no way of destroying my heroic image. But as I learnt through the years, as long as you didn't believe all that rubbish about yourself, you wouldn't come to much harm.'

The other hero, Charles Upham, was never on the speaking circuit. Painfully embarrassed that he had been singled out for his heroism in the bitter World War II fighting in Greece and the Western Desert, he went back to his sheep farm in the South Island and tried to forget it all.

But there was no doubt about his extraordinary courage. Some of his fellow soldiers said he could easily have been awarded the VC 10 times over - all the while suffering debilitating bouts of diarrhoea that would have felled a lesser man.

Mr Upham's hatred of the Nazis persisted well into later life, even to the point where he threatened to fire a shotgun at any Mercedes or other German-built car that ventured on to his property.

As for Sir Edmund, I do not recall ever meeting him in New Zealand. But I will always remember our only encounter in the early 1980s in Thailand, where I had been living for more than a decade.

As programme director of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT), I hit on the idea of inviting him to stop off in Bangkok on one of his regular trips to Nepal, where he routinely spent several months of the year.

He accepted without a moment's hesitation after I told him that the proceeds from the evening would go towards his Himalaya Trust, which raised US$250,000 (S$360,000) a year to build new schools and medical facilities for the sherpas.

I informed him of the hotel I had booked him into and arranged to meet him on his arrival at Don Muang airport. That was the plan. Unfortunately, I got to the airport late - which was easy to do in those days - and missed him completely.

Racing back to the New Peninsula Hotel on downtown Suriwongse Road, I discovered to my consternation that he was not there. I waited and waited, thinking he had got caught in traffic. Still, no Sir Ed.

Horrified at losing my guest speaker for what was a booked-out Golden Ballroom in the swank Oriental Hotel, I was a desperate man. No mobile phones in those days, remember, and Sir Edmund did not have my office number.

It was then that someone reminded me there was another, much more down-market Peninsula Hotel on Rajadamnoen Road, near the Grand Palace. Sure enough, he had checked in there after grabbing a taxi from the airport. Unlike me, the great man was totally unfazed. We had a good laugh - more out of relief for me than anything - and off we went to the Oriental.

I will always remember that night, one of the most successful in the club's history. We ran a film on the great British mountaineer Chris Bonnington and then Sir Edmund delivered his speech, full of anecdotes and schoolboy humour.

Journalists and the associate members who attended these events were always talking, often to a point where we had to call for quiet. This time, the audience was rapt, listening intently to this towering, supremely modest man who had become a genuine legend.

When the evening was over, scores of people lined up from the back of the ballroom to the stage, waiting for Sir Edmund to autograph notebooks, scraps of paper and even the books he had written that had been lying around on shelves for years.

I never met him again, but it didn't matter. Up close, he was exactly the man I always imagined him to be and that was enough.

thane.cawdor@gmail.com