At Nakorn Patom we didn’t stop, but Pong said we’d take a photo of the pagoda on the way back, and on we speed to Bampong. The road was now good, and the driver, whose bare feet and massive arms were apparently made of shock-proof iron, put the speed up to the 60 k.p.h. mark most of the way. From the pagoda to Bampong is only about 23 kilometres, and very shortly we were driving along a broad dusty road, wooden Thai houses on either side, and rich looking green trees and slight undergrowth mingling with the garden bananas and papayas. Pong said nothing until suddenly: ‘There was your first camp,’ and laughed. It might have been, but to my shame and surprise I never recognised it for an instant. Not until we were in the town, and the main road down the left to the station came in view, did I honestly feel I could say that I even recognised Bampong. That road, however, was familiar.

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.