Last year, I stayed in some incredible hotels Sri Lanka: The Fortress Resort & Spa near Galle was particularly dreamy. As I start planning my travels for 2025, I've been reminiscing about some of the other beautiful places I've stayed in over the years. I've put together this selection of my most unique and memorable stays around the world. I hope it helps inspire your own holiday plans!

I was sad to bid farewell to my old passport this week — not just because it was an EU one (*sob*) but also because the stamps inside remind me of the travel experiences I've enjoyed over the past decade. To highlight some of these wonderful memories, I decided to pick one photo from each year, and boy was that hard! (I cheated because the header image features an 11th photo!)

Later this year, I am travelling to Peru, where I hope to cross another item off my bucket list: hiking the Inca Trail and visiting Machu Picchu. I'm really excited about the trip, which will be my first time in South America, and I couldn't help but look back on some of the other amazing travel experiences I've been lucky enough to have over the past few years. I hope some of these will inspire you with your own holiday planning for 2018 and beyond.

I enjoy putting together my annual leap list, mainly because it serves as a way of highlighting some of the places to which I've travelled and the things I have done. After a lack of leaps in the leap year last year, I jumped right back in this year and had plenty to choose from.

The nice thing about Costa Rica is that it is small enough that you can see a lot of the key sights in two weeks. Most visitors head out of San José pretty quickly and then visit La Fortuna and the Arenal Volcano and the cloud forests at Monteverde and Santa Elena. This itinerary takes about a week, leaving you with another week to spend on the beach, and this is when you have a choice to make: Pacific or Caribbean coast? 

Warning: image-heavy post ahead. One of the reasons I wanted to visit Costa Rica was because of its incredible biodiversity. Although it's a pretty small country, the landscape and the climate changes quickly from cloud forest to rain forest to hot, dry beaches and as such, it would be difficult to spend two weeks there and not see some cool creatures. 

Spot the howler monkeys

After an action-packed first week in Costa Rica, we have been spending our second week hopping from beach to beach. En route from our hotel to Playa Tamarindo, the heavens opened for the first time of the holiday and we were forced to seek refuge in one of the main restaurants that line the main drag of 'Tamagringo.' 

We left the cloud forest today, journeying over rocky, unpaved roads down the mountain, until we finally reached the Pan-American highway, where things improved a little. Still it's hard to complain when we were in our hotel pool cooling off well before noon.

We're staying near at El Sabanero Eco Lodge, near Tamarindo, a little way away from the beach and the shops. It's pretty quiet out here, but we're expecting another dawn wake-up call from the monkeys. Later, though, we are going in search of food and waves, and a little bit more civilisation. Relatively speaking.

There isn't a huge amount to do in the towns of Monteverde and Santa Elena — the restaurants tend to be touristy and overpriced — but we did manage to find a few nice places to go. Top of my list was The Common Cup, an independent coffee shop serving espresso drinks made with Monteverde coffee roasted on site. Plus, they do a good line in latte art. Yesterday, I tried a cappuccino, which was too milky for me; this morning's macchiato was much better: rich and creamy.

When you're staying in Monteverde, Costa Rica, most of the activities are in or near one of the cloud forests. The two largest are the Monteverde reserve and the Santa Elena reserve, but I still haven't worked out which is which, especially given the two 'towns' of Monteverde and Santa Elena are next-door neighbours, and neither consists of anything more than a few unpaved roads on the hilltop, with a handful of sodas, touristy shops and hotels.

We left our lovely little cabin at the foot of the Volcán Arenal early this morning (we were staying at Hotel Campo Verde and I would highly recommended it).

In La Fortuna and the Arenal National Park, there are a whole load of activities on offer. It's one of the most popular regions in Costa Rica! As we will be doing a canopy tour in our next location, we decided to do a four-in-one combination tour, which offered a floating safari, a tour of the Catarata de La Fortuna, a hike around the Volcán Arenal and a visit to one of the many hot springs in the area.

Today we travelled from Costa Rica's capital, San José, to the town of La Fortuna, some 100 miles northwest of the capital. We took the bus and because the main road winds it way through the mountains, the journey takes 4 1/2 hours. At one point, the fog or cloud was so thick that we couldn't see the treacherous drop beyond the edge of the narrow road.

When you fly to Costa Rica from Europe, the length of the flights and the time difference mean you pretty much have to stay one night in the capital, San José, although even Lonely Planet couldn't muster up much enthusiasm for the place.

I'm off adventuring in the morning. My bags are packed—I'm taking a little more than shown in the photo, but not much—and in case you can't guess, I'm going to Costa Rica for a fortnight, which achieves my not-really-a-resolution of taking a two-week holiday in a new hot country. 

Costa Rica essentials. Just add a sun hat. And an umbrella.