Where will Kathryn Thomas be going next year - Brazil, Chile, Papua New Guinea? Catherine Clearygets a fix on holiday trends from the enviable presenter of No Frontiers.
It is such a pre-Tiger tale. But here goes. Small girl goes with her siblings and their grandmother to Dublin airport to sit and eat sandwiches and watch the planes take off. It is the 1980s. Air hostesses are glamorous. Mass shopping trips to New York appear as likely as day-trips to the moon and Dublin airport is crammed only at Christmas and New Year when Irish workers clock in and out of the country. Small girl grows up. She ends up presenting a travel programme that involves her jetting around the world for RTÉ.
Kathryn Thomas still remembers being driven back to her grandmother's house in Raheny after watching everyone else head off on holidays. But the experience left the 28-year-old presenter of the travel programme, No Frontiers, with a fondness for Dublin airport, the portal that most people see as something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
"We used to laugh at my Nana," she says when asked if the hassle of travelling takes the shine off what many think is the best job in Ireland. "She would bring us to the airport to watch the planes take off. But Dublin airport is easy. It's Heathrow that's the nightmare, especially when you're on the way home and sitting in that God-forsaken terminal in the bowels of the earth."
After seven years on television screens, chatting to the camera from wild and wonderful destinations, Thomas recently considered hanging up her passport. But she found she loved the job too much. She finished a stint at home doing up her "little old two-up-two-down house" in Kilmainham and found that once she had the bags packed she was "dying to be off again".
On a December morning in Dublin she is expertly made up and carefully groomed, wearing grey cashmere, slate eye shadow and a jaunty cable-knit hat. When she hears that she features in a friend's dream job list (on the bleaker days at his desk in a law firm he lists "Kathryn Thomas's bag carrier" at the top of his possible alternative careers), she laughs loudly. "He'd have to take a severe cut in salary," she says grinning.
Thomas has become part of the new brat pack of RTÉ celebrity girls - smart, attractive young women as ubiquitous on the social pages as on screen. Her status is probably a little more grown up than a Den presenter, but still has a wide-eyed squeaky-clean quality. There has been a stint on Celebrity You're a Star, those Eircom ads, and many shots of her looking fabulous on the red carpets of charity balls and openings. But when the next series of No Frontiers starts next month, the moniker of travel babe will remain.
"I did wonder last year would I feel the need to change. You do the 'where will I be in five years?' thing, but I'm not someone who plans life like that," she says. If there is a plan, she would much rather end up as a Michael Palin than a Judith Chalmers. "And it's the Judith Chalmers jokes I normally get," she says. On close inspection, she seems to maintain a closer relationship with high-factor sun block than the former Wish You Were Here presenter ever did.
Thomas was in London with Jason Sherlock seven years ago, working on Rapid, a children's sports programme, when she got the call from Ger Heffernan of Frontier Films about a possible new gig. They chatted over a pint in Dublin when she returned and six weeks and a couple of guest presenter slots later, she was in the job. The show is travel as entertainment, with a magazine mix of six-minute packages to cram in the sights and sounds of a travel destination or experience.
"That's always the difficulty, trying to capture the essence of a country or a trip or a city in that kind of time, but we're not trying to be Michael Palin." Would she like to be? "I would really," she says with a gleam. And it is the more out-of-the-way travel stories that she has enjoyed the most.
She is a reader and a diary-writer during her long spells in arrivals and departures. The diaries form the backbone for a travel book planned for publication next year. "They're full of the stuff that never made it to air, the names of people we met and stories. It will be my personal account of having been to some of the places off the beaten track such as Venezuela and the Antarctic as well as factual information about things such as vaccinations and travel arrangements."
It took her a while to agree to do a book because of the "confidence thing". "I read what I've written in my diary and it's almost conversational, then I sit down to try and put it into words and I get all flowery and say, 'no that's shit' and delete it all again."
As a travel presenter, one of the changes Thomas has seen over the years has been the growing guilt attached to air travel, and she has not been unaffected by the climate issue. "I've travelled in Australia and the southern hemisphere where people are a lot more aware of it, but I also work in an industry where I see the benefits of tourism, in places such as Africa and South America."
She cites a recent survey that found that while most people are aware of climate change, 90 per cent said they wouldn't change their holiday plans to polish up their green credentials. "I offset my own carbon footprint through an online organisation, climatecare.org, which is a business not a charity. They fund bio-energy projects with countries that are not covered by the Kyoto treaty." The offset cost of a return trip to Sydney is between €60 and €70. According to the website, such a trip generates 5.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide, compared to 3.5 tonnes produced by driving 10,000 miles in an average car.
"That's what I've chosen to do personally. It's a different situation if you have a family of four kids and you've been saving for the trip to Orlando. The biggest problem with air travel is long haul."
There are, she says, "so many different surveys about carbon footprints and you go on the internet and your head is wrecked. I did up my house a few months ago and I was very careful to use energy-saving lightbulbs, then I was reading about attic insulation and went up the ladder into the attic and saw that the roof wasn't insulated. So that's another thing to be done. I drive a Peugot 307. I love it and I'm not going to apologise for the size of the engine. I think a world without holidays would be a very boring world. But it's about people doing small things and putting pressure on government to keep up their side of the bargain.
A new series of No Frontiers begins on RTÉ1 on Tuesday, January 1st
GUEST PRESENTER LUCY KENNEDY TRAINS ELEPHANTS
I had two stories to do in Thailand, the first was looking at the luxury hotels and spas. The second involved me becoming an elephant trainer or mahout. I stayed in hotels in southern Phuket and Kao Lak. I've never stayed anywhere as posh. In the Banyan Tree on Phuket you didn't just have a room, you had a little villa, and if you want to go to reception somebody collects you in a golf buggy.
I did feel like lady muck. Over the three days I didn't actually sleep. There was too much luxury available to let myself miss any of it. This is the life I should have led. It was like stepping into a different world. And the food was just divine. After three of these hotels, I went up to the elephants.
The Thai Elephant Conservation Centre is like a Jurassic Park for elephants. There are lots of rescue animals, elephants injured by landmines or shot or hunted, and they are treated like babies. You can stay on-site or stay just slightly outside, and it's in very basic conditions. But the pure love of the elephants made it wonderful. I was dressed in a very unattractive outfit, long-sleeved shirt and trousers, to keep the mosquitoes away. Everyone is assigned their own elephant and I specifically asked that I didn't get the psycho. But they were all so gentle and so well-trained. They are such placid and elegant animals. I got a female elephant in her twenties. I was a bit of a Bridget Jones on tour and I'd ask her to go right, forgetting that she only understands Thai. I had to drop her off in the jungle and then walk back and I'm so unfit my bum was numb and my thighs were killing me. I was so sad leaving, even though my elephant's breath really stank, especially at 6.30 in the morning. When I saw the footage to record the voice-over, I started to cry. Luxurious hotels or down and dirty with the elephants? I think I'm a down and dirty kind of girl.
GUEST PRESENTER JOHN KELLY RETURNS TO NEW ORLEANS
I tend to do the American trips. I've done New York, Nashville, Memphis, LA, New Orleans, Louisiana and Cajun country, the Pacific Coast Highway and Route 66. I think a lot of these are places we largely inhabit in our heads. I try to find the best musicians, beers and local food, so I do some internet research and then we're helped by local tourist people. I did a return visit to New Orleans, post-Katrina. There's no denying the city is flying largely on one wing, but there are very impressive efforts being put in by everyone, and they really want your tourism - for you to go there and have a good time.
When I heard about a Katrina bus tour, I did wonder, but it's not atrocity tourism. It makes you fully aware of what happened. The extent of the devastation is enormous and they want to show you places such as the ninth ward. And that's not a place where tourists would ever have been. But the important thing is that it is the place where people who entertain you when you're in the city used to live. The roots stuff in the music there is in trouble. It's as if all the Irish musicians in Donegal and Clare were living in another country, but the Chieftans are playing in the Concert Hall so everyone thinks it's okay.
The Louisiana and Cajun trip was the one I enjoyed most. These are very quiet places with no elaborate lifestyles, where people live off the swamp and catch fish. It's basic. You have roadside dancehalls, and people speaking French. The trick with America is to get on to the back roads, where it's far more real and far more interesting.
In all the trips, I think the most spectacular thing I saw was Monument Valley. I was with a Navajo Indian, disappointingly called Gerald, and we met this old Navajo woman who must have been 100. It is one of those places people have to see before they die.
KATHRYN THOMAS ON . . .
The secrets of packing: "I've lived in my house for three years and I don't possess an iron. My sister moved in with me six months ago, she couldn't believe I'd existed for two and a half years without one. I never iron anything. If you roll the clothes as opposed to folding them you can fit a lot more in."
The best guides: "I love Frommers and I also highly recommend www.tripadvisor.com. I'm a little bit blasé about Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, but they were both life-changing. You can get to a crossroads in South America and find four people all holding open the page directing them to that crossroads."
Holiday hotspots for 2008: "Brazil, Chile and South America in general; also Kenya, Papua New Guinea and Mexico. Eco-tourism will continue to grow in popularity, as will voluntary holidays such as Niall Mellon's housing project in South Africa or reforestation projects. There are new routes to Greece. The States is always of interest and of course China will be huge."
Personal highlights: "Travelling in Africa has been so rewarding. This year I've done some wonderful train travel through Europe. I do take a holiday myself. Last year I went to a surf camp in Costa Rica. Before that it was an Indian yoga retreat, but I found myself leaping out of bed at 7am, saying: 'where's the van, where's the tour guide, where are we off to?' "
"Probably Japan. I had some kind of bug and was hallucinating and sweating and spent two days in bed. The place is so computerised and Blade Runnerish anyway it was doubly weird with a high fever. I want to go back and see it properly."