Noguchi has left his mark. The dye-works of his that demanded the planting of castor-oil bushes, has made a small castor-oil jungle of the entire camp site. Viewed from 50 yards distance, there is no camp to be seen at all, only a solid mass of reddy-green bushes. I laughed as I thought of the day I collected the berries from them with Joe Morris. We drove up to the gate. Of the gate, two stumps about three feet high remained; of the guardroom, nothing at all. The dug-out that poor old Bill Drower had lived in was still visible, and so was the bund. Even at this stage I was reluctant to get down into the verdant bund [bank], so I took my photos from the top! Of huts in the camp, absolutely nothing remained, the one that I’d seen from the road being obviously a newcomer and nothing to do with the old camp. The layout was only traceable through the paths and the malarial drains. The packed castor-oil bushes left about a six-foot wide path where the camp had been, but it was difficult at first to spot the left turn before reaching the snakes and ladders Hut, and past the British Pump. We did find this, however, and from here we tracked down the position of the cook-houses. The first ones had utterly disappeared, but by the portions opposite about the third or fourth hut, I found some Roman looking remains of the fire-places where the kaulis [Coolies] had been put to boil the rice. Pong stood on top of the last of the cookhouse remains, and my camera, if all goes well, will record them for all time.

I found the entrance to my old Hut 7 because it was next to the secondary road that ran through the camp, and it was possible to see the little bridge at the entrance that crossed the malarial drain. Further down the path the tree was still growing where the monkey used to be, and I immediately saw the decent Nip Gunso and the redly naked body of Hank the Yank. I walked over to the bund on the railway side, where, thank heaven, even the latrines had managed to vanish, and I tried to take a decent picture of the Kamburi sky-line and the hills around it. I could have wandered around, picking out old landmarks for another hour, but our time was short, and Pong wanted to get on. So we went back to his house for lunch.