KEY POINTS:
It was Sir Ed who put it best: "Well, James has really changed," he remarked to his former climbing companion Dr Mike Gill. They had just met again with the reporter from the Times who had climbed to base camp, 18,000ft (5496m) high in the Himalayas, lugging his
typewriter, to cover the original Everest expedition of 1953. Back then James Morris was a "fit, intensely ambitious" 26-year-old former Army intelligence officer who so impressed the Times it gave him its toughest assignment.
And when he showed up for one of the Everest reunions, as the understated Sir Ed remarked, he had really changed. He had become Jan: he was a woman.
Jan Morris doesn't want to talk about that sex change stuff now. She has been a woman for more than 35 years, since the operation in Marrakesh. It is detailed in her book, Conundrum (1974). She has suffered the sniggers, answered the questions. Now 81 and an acclaimed writer with around 40 books behind her, she refuses to discuss it any more.
Back then she had to have the op in Morocco because her doctors in Britain refused to do it unless she divorced her wife, Elizabeth. Morris, the father of their five children (one twin daughter died young), refused to do that. Indeed, there is an appealing steadfastness to the rather grand Morris: right through, first as wife, then, presumably as friend, Elizabeth has remained a constant companion. She's tucked up in bed at the Copthorne Hotel in Auckland this very minute, having a sleep before the pair go out to dinner with the remainder of the original Everest expedition team.
One of the other amazing things about Jan Morris is that she looks so young. Her white hair is thick and wild as though she's had an electric shock. Her skin is smooth, her lippie coral, her back straight and strong. She sits in her striped T-shirt, slacks and sensible flat shoes, pouring tea as though offering a sacrament: "Do you like milk first? I do."
She was scheduled to speak at Wellington Writers Festival in 2006 but fell ill after a fall: "I had brain surgery as a matter of fact. So I found I wasn't up to much so they kindly allowed me to cancel it."
She had two operations for what she describes as "a sort of brain haemorrhage".
"Never mind I'm all right now."
Her fare to this week's state funeral was paid - as it was for all the members of that successful Everest team - by the New Zealand Government (or, as she reminds me, us!). Which is a good thing considering Morris' purse, carefully zipped into her red shoulder bag and containing credit cards and money, was stolen while going through customs at Heathrow.
Luckily at the Copthorne our guests only have to pay for two things themselves: "Overseas telephone calls and in-house entertainment," she giggles, which is especially appealing in an ancient author who has had a sex change: "I thought it was the call girls.
"So I arrived in New Zealand penniless and forlorn. But not terribly."
She brightens. "It was Sunday, don't forget, and 12 hours wrong. But it turned out to be a pleasure. Everyone was nice, the local bank was nice, then I rang home and the dear old manager at our bank was so kind."
Did you always want to be a travel writer?
"No! I hate the term travel writer," she says, getting a bit gruff. "I'm not one at all!" She claims to have eliminated the classification "travel writer" in Britain because she made such a fuss. "Travel books are guide books," she says firmly. "Now they have travel literature. I don't write about travel, I write about places and particularly the effect of places on my own sensibility."
Here in Auckland she's already been wandering about aimlessly, as she does in all new cities, noting the glum tourists shuffling up Queen St.
"They reminded me of Uncle Sam in The Muppets, the Eagle," she says. "They all have the same expression on their faces. Of course, half of them are staying here."
The other thing she does when getting to know a city is obey a verse from the Psalms: "To grin like a dog and run about the city."
"I have a thing called the smile test which I use to gauge the temper of a city," she says. "Which is to go round smiling inanely at everybody you meet."
She first devised the smile test in Vancouver. "They're very nice people, Canadians. But they're also very self-conscious. So when you smile at them they can't be absolutely sure you're smiling at them. So their first instinct is to look over the shoulder to make sure I'm not smiling at the person behind them. Second they think, 'she's a bit of a loony, a bag lady, grinning like this' and you can see all the emotions going through their faces. And in the end they allow a sort of faint flicker, a shy smile, which is a very true smile because they've gone through all these emotions beforehand."
And no, you can't do the smile test yourself. "It's too complicated. Only when you're used to the smile test can you sort out the meaning of it all."
San Francisco gets her top marks as "the smilingest city of all. And most people do it truly - they are genuinely friendly people."
New Zealanders are "pretty good you know" and even better than San Franciscans in responding in conversation.
The Everest assignment was her big break. The "aged sages" of the Times obviously liked the ambitious Morris, with his energy, big brain and bold writing style.
His copy was pounded out on the ancient typewriter, then carried by Sherpas to Kathmandu. "The faster they went the more money [he paid them]." For the big story - the one that announced Hillary and Tenzing had conquered Everest - they devised a code only his editors could decipher and so scooped the story for the Times. The message read: SNOW CONDITIONS BAD, ADVANCED CAMP ABANDONED YESTERDAY. AWAITING IMPROVEMENT.
"Because of it I got a fellowship in America," says Morris. Instead of spending half the year studying and the other half travelling, she skipped the University of Chicago bit ("a gloomy hole") and took to the road for a year.
"It was a great gift because they gave you a car and a stipend and I was still paid by the Times as well."
The resulting book was Coast to Coast (1956), followed, over the next 40 years, by many more.
Today Jan and Elizabeth live in the Welsh countryside ("like living in the Somme, all mud and rain") with Ibsen, an intelligent and much-loved cat with thick, hairy pantaloons and shaggy orange and white fur.
They are in the stables, their son, Tim, "bang opposite" in the barn with his children. Their daughter has three children, another son lives in Canada and one is a wanderer. "We're all very fond of one another. Three of the four are writers in one way or another, Tim an acclaimed poet in the Welsh language."
Like any parent she worries about her kids: "The hardest part is when the children get older and they have problems. I worry about Tim, largely because he's got small children."
At 81 she has published her "last and best" book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, while a posthumous book is sold and waiting for her to die. "It's called Allegorisings, because I've come to think all life is an allegory - everything has more than one meaning. So around this rather elusive and eccentric conviction I've put together a series of essays and summed them all up."
And this, she says, is truly the end. "I shan't write another book, that's for sure. I'm foolishly proud. I'd be ashamed. Just occasionally I have a twinge at what I've done, but not often."
It has been a good life. She's found it easy making a living as a writer.
Now her passion is kindness, which she believes has the power to transform society: "I want to start a political party of kindness because it's a great untapped force. You know in America religion is a very powerful political force. But it antagonises half of the republic and intoxicates the others. Kindness is something everybody understands and values. You don't have to believe in anything, you don't have to have any mumbo-jumbo theologians. Kindness is waiting out there to be tapped in any direction."
Ed Hillary was an example of kindness. "He really is the the only nationally iconic figure [and how she detests the term, icon] not because he climbed some silly mountain, but because he is genuinely a very nice man. It was goodness that made him an icon - pretty rare. I've never heard a word against him actually. Even in the expedition, which is a breeding ground for rivalry."
