By Kazunori Takada WELLINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - New Zealand's Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to conquer Everest, was hailed on Friday as one the 20th century's great adventurers and praised for his lifelong campaign to improve the lives of the Nepali people. Hillary, 88, died after suffering a heart attack in a New Zealand hospital. "To me he was the greatest adventurer of the 20th Century," millionaire Australian adventurer and philanthropist Dick Smith, who flew solo around the world by helicopter, told Reuters. After summiting Everest with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, Hillary pursued other high-profile adventures in the Himalayas and Antarctica, driving farm tractors to the South Pole. But Hillary never forgot the Nepali people who helped bring him worldwide fame as an adventurer. His Himalaya Trust raised about US$250,000 a year and he personally helped build schools, hospitals, bridges, pipelines and even an airfield. "I lit butter lamps and offered prayers for his reincarnation as a human being," said Ang Rita Sherpa, 60, in Katmandu, an old friend who worked for 23 years with Hillary and his Himalayan Trust that implements development projects in Nepal. "Many Sherpa people have offered private prayers while many others are holding special services in monasteries," he said, adding Hillary's friends and Sherpas would organise a special service for him in Kathmandu. In announcing his death, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said: "The legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived. But most of all he was a quintessential Kiwi. He was ours -- from his craggy appearance and laconic style to his directness and honesty". "He was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only knocked off Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity," she said. Australia's acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Hillary made dreams come true. "Sir Edmund's name is synonymous with adventure, with achievement, with dreaming and then making those dreams come true," she said. The conquest of the world's highest mountain in 1953 stunned the world and projected Hillary, a former beekeeper, into an international celebrity and one of the great adventurers. "It was ground-breaking stuff, trying to find out if the human body could even survive those altitudes in those days," said two-time Everest summiteer Andrew Lock. "He was just the sort of climber that all other climbers looked up to as the absolute pinnacle of appropriate and ethical climbing," said Lock. Hillary's close friends said his death was not a surprise but would be a great loss for impoverished Nepal. "It (the death) was not unexpected unfortunately," said Elizabeth Hawley, a mountaineering historian. "But still it is a terrible loss for all his family, friends and the Sherpa people." Australian Tim Macartney-Snape, who has twice summited Everest, said Hillary used his fame not for his own personal gain but to help the people of Nepal. "His fame didn't change him at all, he just used that for his work for the people of Nepal. He was a great humanitarian," said Macartney-Snape. "The Solu Khumbu district in Nepal will be in mourning for a long time because many of the people who are there now, the younger people, went to Hillary's schools or their lives would have been saved by those clinics," he said. The New Zealand flag flew at half-mast at Scott Base in Antarctica on Friday and there was a "very subdued" atmosphere on the base that Hillary started 51 years ago, said Antarctica New Zealand chief executive Lou Sanson. (Additional reporting by Gopal Sharma in Katmandu; Writing by Michael Perry; Editing by Jerry Norton)
An HIV+ girl walks with her plate to the wash basin after eating her lunch at a school for HIV/AIDS affected children in Bhugaon, some 130 km (81 miles) from Mumbai ...
