And so by comfortable bus on the 51 last kilometres to Kamburi. The last trip had been with about 15 of us to 15 cwt truck, racing along the road in the beginning of November 1942, to be met by interpreter Adachi on the site of the new Kamburi Camp. Vague patches of it now seemed familiar, I felt, however, that I was now once more in my part of Siam. I looked at it with an all too understanding eye. Villages were passed, more and more rice-fields and palm trees, and on this trip I could really appreciate the beauty of the countryside. I saw all these sugar-palm trees, with their slender bamboo ladders swaying up the side of the trunks to where the short bamboo containers at the top collected the dripping sugar juice, and I knew well what palm wine, ‘lao’, tasted like. The rice-fields were being ploughed by water buffaloes and oxen, the flooded fields being squelched through slowly by beast and ploughman, the latter sometimes being a near-naked man, a youth, or even a woman with an enormous, broad-brimmed straw hat. Though most of the land was still being ploughed, many of the little fields had their plants pricked out in them for some time from the nursery fields, and already the rice was strong and healthily growing. This, I felt again, was the real, the lasting, the genuinely attractive Siam. It was not only very peculiar, but rather pleasant to be coming back.

To the left of the road we soon saw the remains of Tamuang Camp. Only scrub covered it, no jungle to speak of, and it was discernible clearly only because the fallen in bund was still there. Of bamboo and atap, sign of our passing civilisation, not a twig could be seen. Then came Tamuang village, if the truth were told dark and dirty as it was before, and exactly the same. After that, for me, impatience only for the 14 kilometres to be ended that still separated us from Kamburi. I was very afraid we’d be in the town before I could spot a landmark.

But the hills saved me from such ignominy. You cannot live among hills like those that surround the Kamburi-Chungkai country for two years and forget them in a hurry, especially when you’ve so often got nothing much better to do than sit and look at them. There they were, those massive, deep green, irregular mounds, covered in shaggy, deep green trees and scrub, hard and craggy-looking, and quite unforgettable. Individual spurs and one lion like hill coming into view persuaded me that we were almost there, and with great satisfaction I managed to forestall Pong and point out the site of the Nip camp on the right of the road, and then of the I.J.A. training camp to the left, both of them within a couple of kilometres of the town itself.