Lunch was laid out for us in the stone courtyard of the house facing Pong’s shop, and was a good, Siamese meal – curried chicken, rice, meats, spicy vegetables. But the courtyard was very still, being surrounded by high walls, and it was too hot to eat more than a few mouthfuls. This was probably just as well, for it was already getting late, and Chungkai had yet to be visited. While Pong went down to fix the pom-pom, I went along to see Aroong at his café, and give him some more Players. There I found not only Aroong, but his wife, who had grown rather plumper, and produced another child; but also Bencha, ‘Charlie Chan’, with a Javanese type beard, and I didn’t at first recognise him. Sowana, in khaki shorts and shirt, was sitting quietly and smally in a corner, and Tawi was there, too, in large army boots. And with a very useful command of English. It was an extraordinary meeting. Aroong had a bottle of lao ready, and we drank it with lime-juice; but this time I could not but realise very strongly what a pernicious and inflammatory drink it is.

After a few minutes and a promise to go back there for a ‘lao tea’, we went in the bus down to the landing beach by the river, passing the samelooking dusky queue of chain-gang coolies from the prison, who were carrying up firewood from the river below. Pong, incidentally, who is the local Kamburi big business-man, and very well known, daren’t risk coming up, late as we were, to Chungkai, for there are many robbers about who would be only too glad to seize him and hold him for ransom; so Tawi, with a Luger pistol, and another Thai, got into the pom-pom with me and off we went.

Round the first bend in the river, and lining the bank where we’d first crossed to march to Chungkai, were the same old fishing-boat houses. Coming down towards us were several atap-roofed or corrugated-iron roofed barges, but being the hottest time of the day there were no fishing boats to be seen working. Along the tops of the banks I amused myself picking out the prickly from the non-prickly bamboo, and at one point an iguana about 4 feet long was seen slowly climbing up the sandy cliffs. After about half an hour we came into the stretch from which Chungkai was visible, with the big clump of bamboos nearest us, where Mike O’Reilly and Cyril Darby used to meet Tawi, and in the distance the big, white cutting.