Ha Noi looks like Paris to me. Everywhere we been to looks like somewhere I've been to before. Phnom Penh looked like a French resort on the Atlantic Coast. Mui Ne felt like Minorca. Mumbai nights felt like humid Roman nights and our hotel in Colaba was exactly like the one we stayed in near the Termini station.

I think this is a coping mechanism, so I feel comfortable wherever I am. Yes there are many many strange and wonderful differences to discover, but often its the similarities, or the not-quite similarities which strike you the most and unsettle you. Christmas trees in bright sunlight. BBC World and not BBC One - that sort of thing. Sweet lipton tea with milk rather than milky Earl Grey. You're bolstered by all your preconceptions to face the exotic and the weird ways of other places but are less prepared to see some things as they are at home with all the self-evaluation and sometimes criticism that this leads to. I've walked past a basket full of jumping, skinned frogs in a Phnom Penh market, and felt horrifed, yes, but with a sense of recognition or confirmation of my elaborate imaginings of foreign cultures. But still I can't help myself seeing familiar landscapes everywhere. We rode through some amazing Vietnamese deserts last week and we thought of spaghetti westerns and fake Mexican landscapes.

And then there's the holiday mentality I've developed, the languid, reflexive attitude of the drifting backpacker whose only concerns are how much do I have to pay and when can I eat. Or the habits I've rediscovered from childhood holidays like always having coca cola from the bottle with a straw, or reading a book as the defaul daily activity. My skin has that dry, tanned holiday quality and every night I marvel at the tan lines on my toes, on my wrist where my watch sits. My hair is turning yellow in the sun, I wash it less and less as it becomes strawlike, unruly.

I would like to say that I'm travelling with a healthy dose of the qualities that made great travellers and philosophers of men like Montaigne, for whom travel was an ongoing excercise in understanding not just the other worlds you travel through, but your own, seeing yourself in the faces of other peoples. This is not the case. I can't wait to read a copy of Heat magazine, am obsessed with finally getting a tan (not working, at all) and my biggest daily preoccupation (other than the primeval search for cheap food) is where are all the pretty clothes I can buy today. I've succumbed to that awful navel-gazing attutide of those who have little to do with their day but walk and look and consume. I'm having a wonderful time drifting in this way, don't get me wrong, and am more than happy to wander through the streets of Ha Noi in search of another shop/restaurant/museum with the lovely memory of Paris stalking me like a shadow. We'll see what Ha Noi has to offer and if in ten years time I'll wander through the streets of Paris and see this city instead.