Meeting Sir Edmund Hillary and boring him with my tractor story - Hunter Wells

Hunter Wells and a Kiwi icon. Sir Edmund Hillary is not the one on the left.

There I was hobnobbing with the long, craggy face on our $5 banknote.

Shooting the breeze on the balcony of his Himalayan Trust in Kathmandu. Yep, Sir Ed. And me.

Got the photo to prove it. I’m the one who’s not Sir Ed.

He had been 8848m to the top of the world.

I’d only managed a few rungs up a ladder in a Central Otago apricot orchard before I got vertigo.

But we were drawn together by a mutual love and respect for tractors. Yes, tractors.

Red tractors, Massey Ferguson tractors.

And again, I got stung by the beekeeper.

Tractor driving

I learned to drive on a little red Massey Ferguson. It ended badly.

I couldn’t figure out, when backing, that the trailer moved in the opposite direction to the steering wheel.

I panicked, confused brake and clutch, and jack-knifed.

There were all sorts of expensive, tortured, graunching noises.

And broken bits.

Sixty years later, I am still a crap driver.

Meanwhile, Sir Ed was ripping across the world’s coldest and iciest continent on his modified Massey Ferguson.

It was 1958 and Sir Ed was the first to reach the South Pole overland since Scott half a century earlier, and the first in motor vehicles.

He was groundbreaking. I was just breaking.

His adventure was about national pride, disputed sovereignty, Kiwi attitude and men being men.

Mine was about “buggering” an expensive trailer without leaving the farmyard.

Sir Ed’s story went around the world. Mine didn’t see the light of day until now.

Reunion

I was wandering in a daydream down Remuera Road.

I half-recognised a bloke passing, so I called out “Gidday mate, how are yuh?”

Inquisitively, I turned to see who I had addressed, and Sir Ed was standing, looking at me, stroking a ski-jump that served as a chin and wearing a “who the hell are you?” look on his face.

Years after Kathmandu, I was having afternoon tea with the $5 face at his home in Remuera.

You could drop in. He was that sort of bloke.

I was regaling the great man with what I thought was a riveting story about learning to drive on a Massey Ferguson.

Then I realised that chin had slumped on to the chest and the great man was asleep. He could be forgiven.

He was an older man.

Or was mine just an utterly boring, sleep-inducing story?