I think, at the beginning of my last week before returning to Melbourne, I have been overcome by a little homesickness. Beautiful as it is here in Hanoi, I can't help but think about the fact that I'll get home at the very end of Winter, after the summer I've encountered everywhere else. I was in Cologne at the beginning of the heat wave there, and it was sweltering. Arriving in Hanoi, it was a different kind of heat - but one that left me feeling just as tired. Having a nice lazy time here, wandering around and around in the old quarter, visiting museums and galleries, and sitting in cafes, reading. Great coffee here, I'm glad to say.

Don't quite know what to write - I feel like my trip has turned to list-making. What I want to read when I get home, things I want to buy for people, the things left that I still have to see before getting on that plane, the songs I want to listen to when I get back and don't have to rely on headphones anymore. Movies I want to see and conversations I want to have. All the places in Melbourne I'm longing to visit again.

Before I left Denmark I went to Skagen, and walked off the northern end of Denmark - I walked into the water at the point where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea crash together, so that the one broke over my left leg, and the other broke over my right leg. I felt, standing there, that I was witnessing some endless war between the two bodies of water to gain ground, and imagined somehow that the seas were like bickering gods, never really gaining ground, but never content to give up the argument.

I also went to Silkeborg to see the Tollund Man - the original of my interest in Denmark's bog people. It is only his head that is the original - the body is a replica, as it was never preserved properly. There is something strange in see a human body turned to leather, to still see the open pores in the faces.

I spent a night on another bus, getting from Denmark to Cologne, with a change of buses at Hamburg. Arrived in Cologne at about 2 in the afternoon, and after dropping off my bags immediately went to the Cathedral and to the Ludwis Museum, the reason I decided to spend a night in Cologne. Moved among many more pieces of art that I'd had a craving to see. Especially the Rauschenberg's and the photography collection. It has been strange, though, in all the galleries I've visited, to never see any Australian art. I remember taking an Art History subject in twentieth century art, there were a number of exchange students enrolled in the course. When we got to Sidney Nolan they were puzzled by his inclusion, having never heard of him. So strange finding myself everywhere, and being from a forgotten place. I'm looking forward to a trip out to Heide when I get back, and to wandering among the Joy Hester's and the Charles Blackman's (particular favourites) among others.

Hanoi is crazy beautiful. I've been riding around on the back of a lot of motorbikes, because it's the easiest way to get around when things are too far for walking. Of course, wears helmets and there are hardly any traffic lights around the place. Everyone turns in every direction at once - gorgeous chaos!

I have been spending a lot of time at the Temple of Literature - today I visited it for the third time, sitting there to finsih reading Dante's Inferno, the wonderful Hollander translation. I've been reading it in English first, and then in the Italian - trying to learn more about Italian. I read Mrs Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte a few days ago, and was struck by the way Emily and Charlotte learned French in Brussels - by how the Professor read them pieces of French prose so they could learn the style of good French, before they even had a good grounding in the grammar. Strange to think of them listening to the rhythms of this foreign tongue like that, Emily in her defiantly outmoded fashions. I also read Paradise Lost this last week - somehow a week for diving deep into the central texts of literature again. I don't know what will come next.

I'm hoping to make it out to the Museum of Ethnology tomorrow, and to see the water puppets another night this week. I've also made friends with a shop keeper here, and she has invited me to visit her home this week, and meet her family, which I am very much looking forward to. And in between - more reading and relaxing and thinking, before turning my footsteps home.

Hanoi