As COVID restrictions slowly began to ease around the world, I was grateful to be able to travel more often in 2022 than I had in the previous two years, although I'm still not back at beforetimes levels. This year, I visited six countries across four continents, including four new-to-me countries — Kenya, Uganda, Indonesia and Greece — as well as a long-awaited return to my beloved New York City. Closer to home, I enjoyed a great city break in Bristol and spent far too much time watching Wolves fail to score, consoling myself with speciality coffee stops in Wolverhampton and Brum.

Keep on reading to find out the five stories I've picked out to sum up my travel highlights of the year (you can also check out my 2021 and 2020 editions).

As 2022 draws to a close, it's time for the 12th edition of my annual speciality coffee and food awards, where I share my favourite coffee shops and eateries from among all of those that I visited for the first time this year. Over the past few years, I've tweaked the geographical boundaries of some awards to reflect my travel schedule, which has changed somewhat as a result of COVID.

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!)

At the end of my last post on my recent East African adventure, which focused on my time in Kenya, we had managed to catch our flight to Uganda, with minutes to spare. Once I'd caught my breath, I sat back to enjoy the one-hour flight, passing over Lake Victoria before landing at the lakeside former Ugandan capital, Entebbe.