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.

Each year, as part of my year-in-review top five lists, I like to look back on some of the most memorable places I travelled to this year and, because I enjoy taking silly leaping photos in new places, picking out my favourite five leaps of the year is a fun way to do this. Alas, there were a few particularly memorable trips this year during which, for various reasons, I didn't get the chance to take a leaping photo; most notably, my recent holiday in Reykjavik, where a photo with the Northern Lights in the background would have entailed a 12-second levitation. Even in a leap year, I wasn't quite up to the challenge.

This is the second part of my Vietnam coffee guide, which focuses on the cafes I discovered in Hanoi. (You can read the first part, which covers Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An, here.)

I had planned to put together a single coffee guide highlighting all of my favourite coffee and cafe discoveries from my recent trip to Vietnam. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover a lot of great places on my two-week trip, so I've decided to split the guide into two parts. This first part covers Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and Hoi An; part two, which I will post next week, will focus on Hanoi. I also spent two days in Hué but didn't find any particularly good coffee shops.

Vietnam has been on my travel to-do list for a number of years. I hadn't been to Southeast Asia and decided that Vietnam with its rich culture and history, bustling cities and beautiful scenery, and, of course, delicious food was the best place to start. I had 15 full days in the country; this meant I could take advantage of the current visa waiver for UK visitors to Vietnam for stays of up to 15 days.

I arrived back in Hanoi late on Friday afternoon and had another day-and-a-half in the city before my flight home. After checking into my hotel, I headed straight out for a wander around the Old Quarter, where I was staying, and for dinner.

In a country filled with fine food destinations, Hoi An is rightly viewed as one of the finest. One of the reasons I wanted to stay there a little longer than most of the other cities on my Vietnam itinerary was so that I could sample as many of the restaurants and local dishes as I could. It didn't hurt that Hoi An has a burgeoning speciality coffee scene, which I did my best to explore.

After rushing to pack everything into my short stays in Hué and Saigon, I changed gear once I got to Hoi An, a beautiful town on the Central Vietnam coast. Hoi An doesn't have an airport or train station so most visitors fly or take the train to Da Nang, which is 20 miles north. I took the train from Hué and it was a beautiful ride through the misty mountains. 

I couldn't drag myself out of bed as early I would have liked this morning, but after a quick breakfast at my hotel, I headed straight out to Hué's UNESCO-listed Imperial City. The site is huge — the steep walls run in a 2 x 2 km square, surrounded by a moat and just north of the Perfume River.  This imperial enclosure is nested within a bigger citadel and do note that the ticket desk is just before the moat by the main gate. It only takes 25 minutes or so to walk there from the hotel zone, but there are plenty of people who would love to give you a boat, bike, cyclo or taxi ride if you think it's too far.

On Tuesday morning, I took a flight from Saigon to Hué (pronounced hweh), the former imperial capital, located about 600 miles north of Saigon and 400 miles south of Hanoi. I arrived at the airport two hours ahead of my flight as when I tried to check in online, the Vietnam Airlines website told me that the flight was overbooked. Luckily, I got my seat, and when I reached the gate I found a group of about 100 excitable Vietnamese tweens (one of whom was documenting everything on his video camera); I assume that their group was the reason for the check-in issues.

Numerous tour companies run trips from Saigon to the Mekong Delta, a huge region of southwest Vietnam that begins about 50 miles southwest of Saigon. There are thousands of villages and towns, as well as more rural areas and tiny river tributaries to explore. When researching this trip, I soon realised that you really need at least a couple of days to get even a flavour of the region, but I only had a day and so I booked onto a one-day tour.

My hectic day on Saturday meant that I slept perfectly on Saturday night, only waking to the sound of my alarm. I left my Ho Chi Minh City hotel before 8 am, hoping that it might be a little cooler and it was — but only by a degree or two. First on my to-do list was coffee. 

I left London around noon on Friday and, after a layover in Hong Kong just long enough to grab a decent macchiato from the Illy Cafe and soak in some of those moody, mountainous views, I arrived in Saigon (AKA Ho Chi Minh City; I've been calling it Saigon, as most of the locals seem to) at around 10.30 am local time on Saturday. 

Today I'm heading off on my next adventure: a two-week trip to Vietnam, which I've been planning for the past six months. I have never visited Southeast Asia before and I initially toyed with the idea of spending a few days in Cambodia too but I've decided to save that for another trip to try to pack in as many of Vietnam's sights, sounds, smells and flavours as I can. It is, of course, impossible to 'do' Vietnam — or very many countries, for that matter —in just two weeks, but I hope that the small selection of towns and cities I am visiting will at least give me a taste of what the country has to offer.