June 14, 1957, Saturday: We all got up early this morning. The time of departure was set for 06:15, but before that I had to pick up Prachuan, whose Dad better miss seeing that we took his entire arsenal: 2 hunting rifles, a Parabellum and a light pistol. Actually, that had been my main reason for inviting Prachuan along on this trip, because he did not appear very useful in other respects. His father was a rich Siamese, he himself had been educated in the U.K. where he had been throwing around money as prototype of the spoiled rich son. Nevertheless, as long as everything went fine he was a pleasant bloke.
The third man was Tom, from the Netherlands-East Indies of old, who had worked on the Burma Railroad in WW2. A former sailor, he was fond of hunting as well as fluent in Thai because he had stayed here and married a Chinese-Thai lady. I had a tough job persuading her to part with Tom for two weeks and ended up leaving some kind of deposit for him!
Our luggage which we tried to reduce to a minimum, nevertheless appeared unbearably much. My tent alone weighed 7 kgs, and we distributed it, as we did the food and cooking utensils. We also decided to eat a lot the first couple of days, and first the heavy cans.
I had the serendipitous luck that my movie camera had been soaked on the previous tour and that the dealer had not been able to fix it in the promised time, so that he offered to loan me another, much better, camera. He did get a shock when it proved to be for two weeks instead of just a weekend…

We loaded up the jeep and the four of us left …number four had been hastily recruited by Tom to return the jeep from Kanchanaburi to Bangkok.

For the first time in weeks it did not rain so enjoying the fine fresh morning air we raced the first 130 kms of our 14 day journey to the Three Pagoda Pass, situated at the border of Thailand and Birma in a dense jungle said to be full of mosquitoes, leeches, tigers, wild elephants and bandits.