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(3)

It is a resort city, a Riviera for the French in the Far East. If one has to work here, siesta time and evening should be liesurely so I see no end to accomplishing what lies before me to achieve this leisure, but it requires discipline to commence the hopeless task, but I will begin and in spite of all this I am happy to be here. I will work hard and with dedication. Old hands who know what the situation is, say that even slight success is impossible. This is true only because the need is so great and because the people are so far behin so dependent on industrialized countries, so aware of their debt to us that they are self conscious. I'm sure they must be dismayed and confused too and this is all the more reason why we must be positive and unconfused. It's awfully good to be talking with friends and doing so, I realize how great the need is and how, without friends to talk to I really am here.

I did another letter for you coming in to Siam the other day and here it is.

This is a four hour Thai Airlines flight out of now rainy Hong Kong. Siamese silk window curtains dominate the cabin whereas Chang Kai Chek's? cat planes had extravagant fiberglas festooned and draped wherever possible. Four hours is long enough to adjust gear, figure the dwindling money talley, munch a great tasmanian apple, swiss chocolate, tasteless english cake, sleep. The popular 6:00 A.M. flight out of here means leaving from the airport at 3:00. I awake above a bank, a screen of small feather clouds, definitely Oriental wisps, not at all solid, creating a surface but anything beneath them seemed underwater and so the land seemed , a real mirage. The land below probably Cambodia, flattened by the height and desolate in its under the sea like quality. After the squalid over crowding of Hong Kong and the land crowding of Taiwan, in which every square foot is in continuous use, uninhabited land seems more wasteful than welcome; and then another lunch. Strange combination, it is neither English or Continental nor Chinese or Siamese, all of which I'm sure it is supposed to be. I pocket a hard boiled egg for some Bangkok beggar woman. The piece de resistance, an imported blue goose orange from the States. Their are no oranges, only tangerines over here. So this is important. A confused Thai tried to eat it like a pear, quartered. I'm the only European (new term) in the cabin. Most interesting are four Thai women. They are pretty people and quiet with large good stones simply set in their small ears above handsomely inconspicuous silk Korat skirts, these are Provincial women; beautifully made, delicate hand stitched, sheer nylon tricot blouses (they are also wearing) in the rather double breasted, Chinese manner, closed with old Jade buttons. Prominent to take the place of a brooch and a necklace, the large shiny fountain pen dangling inside the neck of each blouse. Lunch over I rubber neck down again.

There begin to be a few villages hidden in the trees and some cultivated fields. Thre are roads also, straight dirt roads but empty even of bicycles and ox carts and then off the plateau there are rivers; serpentine, snakey rivers in drab green chalk colour. A little later on, these will become cafe au lait, no transparency. No longer are there any roads but a tremendous canal system. A real master plan. Big canals rather than irrigation ditches, these laid out as far as one can see on the horizon, as if the latitude and longitude lines of the globe suddenly became real and defined. They are visible because their are only trees along the canals and only houses. These canals must be ten miles apart and yet not even a grainery or tool shed lies between one and another. The Thai love for being on the water, even narrow stagnant water, must be great enough to compensate for walking miles in the fields and their is no green. Fla flat country like modulating bed dry colours of Dubuffet, and the rice stubble and soil seem almost the same colour and the listless rivers cross and re=cross the great canals, and damp streaks on the earth are more apparent than one realizes. These canals are more to drain the land than to irrigate it, as in Taiwan and the canals or ---? become more full of craft and the closer together as we begin to drop. I watch the small insect shadow of our plane racing along behind us and the dry deadness becomes colour extremely unique, beautiful in its lack of shadow; the shades of Picasso's Rose period translated into celladonish ochre, and the textures are scruffy and casual as opposed to the manicured neatness of Japan.