To reach the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, you take a cyclo from the centre of Hanoi, past government buildings and a statue of Lenin, to the main entrance of the compound. You buy your ticket and leave your bags at the office, but are allowed to keep hold of your cameras and valuables. You are led into a waiting room where a video about Ho's life is playing; it's in Vietnamese, but you can guess at what the voiceover is saying. A guard calls out, and everyone in the waiting room files along to another booth where you leave your camera. The guards usher people into a neat line. You wonder how many more stages you need to pass through before you get to the man himself, and for some reason are reminded of going to visit Santa's grotto in a department store when you were a kid. Eventually, you enter the inner sanctum, and file past Uncle Ho in his glass case, remembering to keep your hands out of your pockets and to maintain a suitably reverential demeanor. You wonder whether it's really him in the box, or, as some suspect, a waxwork. You emerge from the gloom of the interior into the glaring sunlight that beats down on the parade ground outside, and look back at the mausoleum - a monolithic block of cold grey marble. As your eyes adjust to the brightness you recall television pictures of massed ranks of rocket launchers and armoured cars strutting past during the May Day parades. Or was that Red Square?

I could feel the weather in Hanoi growing increasingly cold and drizzly by the day, just like London in November, so it seemed a good time to head south. There is a very popular Open Tour bus route that runs from Hanoi all the way to Ho Chi Minh City; the tickets are cheap (around 20 dollars), and you can hop on and off at selected towns along the way. The route is a legacy of the days when Vietnam had only just opened up to tourism, about 10 years ago, and only a few selected cities were open to foreigners. Now, theoretically, you can go anywhere you like, but getting away from the Open Tour route can be difficult and expensive. As the bus carries you from place to place, you can almost feel the hand of the Party on the steering wheel.

A 14-hour overnight journey took me from Hanoi to Hué, the capital of Vietnam until the middle of the 20th century. The weather was still dreary as I walked through a gate in the old city walls and into the area known as the Citadel, the administrative and religious heart of the ancient capital. The ruins of the once magnificent temples and houses looked bleak and austere under the grey sky. Sometimes, there was just a small sign in front of an empty green field, explaining the function of the building that stood on the site before it was flattened by a bomb. It was still raining the next day, when I took a boat trip to the tombs of the last Ngyuen emperors, which lie along the banks of the Perfume River. The emperors liked to design their mausolea while they were still alive, and the different styles - ranging from graceful, understated beauty to full-on, overblown pomposity - hinted at the contrasting personalities of the rulers. The interest of the tour was only slightly marred by the boat drivers' little scam: instead of mooring next to each tomb (which they used to do until a few years ago), they now stop about up to a mile away, forcing you into negotiations with the motorbike-taxi drivers. Returning to the city, the boat passed under the main bridge across the river, a joyless, angular Soviet-style concrete construction that seemed to intensify the grey of the sky. Too much grey. I was back on the Open Tour bus again the next morning.

Hoi An, a few hours south of Hué, was a relief - for a start, the sun put in a brief appearance. Hoi An was once a thriving port, and is one of the few cities that survived the war unscathed, so the old merchants' houses still survive, and the historic district by the river is full of character. Today, the town manages to be touristy without losing its charm. I spent a few days there exploring the old streets and browsing through the shops - and of course had a couple of shirts made at one of the countless tailors' stores. I also, somehow, managed to end up at a midnight beach party. It was chucking-out time at the bar, a group of us were looking for somewhere else to drink, but Hoi An is not known for its range of trendy nightspots. But of course, all of the motorbike drivers outside the bar knew somewhere we could go... So we all hopped onto the bikes - a driver and two passengers on each - and sped off into the night. What am I doing here, I thought; these guys could be taking us anywhere. Surprisingly, it was all very organised; they took us to the beach, a guy turned up selling beer from a crate, and a bottle of foul-tasting whisky was going round. Someone managed to get a fire going. We could see a few lights of ships out at sea, and from time to time a powerful searchlight beam - a lighthouse, possibly? - would sweep across us.

It was only when it was time to go back into town that Matt from Australia, who I'd shared a motorbike with on the way to the beach, realised that his camera was missing. Maybe he dropped it, maybe someone picked it up - a search of the beach revealed nothing. It's one of the traveller's worst nightmares. A roll of film, or a memory card, is one of the few truly irreplaceable items that we carry. No insurance policy can compensate for the loss of the images and memories that they hold. Back in the deserted town centre, one of the motorbike drivers hinted that he knew "people" in the town who might know what had happened to the camera. How true this was I'm not sure, and I don't know if any other negotiations took place, but a couple of days later the memory card turned up at Matt's hotel. (No sign of the camera, of course...) Perhaps I felt a touch of gratitude towards the bike driver, but I was left speculating as to his degree of involvement in the theft. I also found out that it is illegal to be on the beach after midnight. Maybe that explains the searchlight...

"I'd like a ticket to the Museum of Scam Culture please. Er, I mean the Museum of Cham Sculpture..." Certain things about Vietnam had obviously lodged themselves in my subconscious. The Cham Museum in Danang, which I visited as a day-trip from Hoi An, houses some beautiful statues and stone carvings from the ruins of the Champa kingdom, which dominated the surrounding area towards the end of the first millenium AD, and endured for several more centuries. As usual, the cheapest way to get there was to hitch a ride on one of the Open Tour buses, and ask to be dropped off in Danang. The journey from Hoi An shouldn't take long, but as a service to the tourists, the buses stop for a break at the Marble Mountains, an unimpressive set of caves and shrines about half way along the road between the two towns. The buses unload their tourists into a long street of identical shops, all selling marble sculptures. Nothing with the grace or mystery of the Champa stonework that I'd seen in Danang - this was pure kitsch: leaping dolphins, prancing horses, Michelangelo Davids, Venus de Milos. Not much that could fit in a backpack. Nobody on the bus seemed to be very interested, but for so many shops to remain open there must be a market for this stuff. Who buys it?! A pair of guardian lions might look alright outside a Chinese temple, but I tried to imagine them standing either side of the driveway of a suburban semi...

Christmas was coming. Like most people who travel for several months, I was losing track of the days, and I considered forgetting about Christmas Day altogether. But the dull weather from the north had finally worked its way down to Hoi An, and I couldn't bear the thought of spending December 25th under the same grey sky that I remembered from so many Christmases in London. Time to move on. Time to get back on the bus.