Travel journalism - nice work if you can get it

WARREN GAMBLE talks to a journalist who goes on holiday for a living.

Popping across to France for lunch, roaring down deserted New Zealand roads, working on the tan in Tobago - Charlie Burgess has one of the best jobs in the world.

The travel editor for the Guardian is jetlagged and one of his bags has split on the flight to Auckland, but he has the decency not to complain.

Instead, the 47-year-old has schoolboyish enthusiasm about his first trip to New Zealand. "I mean here I am across the other side of the world ... I mean gosh, it's fantastic."

He has been in the job for a year, long enough to clock up the air points, not long enough to become jaded about gadding about. That cross-channel lunch was in Lille, northern France, he has also touched down in Las Vegas, Boston, Tobago, South Africa and is heading to Corsica soon.

After a newspaper apprenticeship including stints as a sportswriter at the Guardian, sports editor at the Independent and associate features editor at the Daily Mail, his new job has made him a popular colleague.

"You do seem to get more invitations to places when you can dangle a ticket to Shanghai in the office."

Lured to New Zealand as a judge at the Cathay Pacific Travel Media Awards last week, he has since been opening the throttle on a large motorbike around the Coromandel before heading south to sample the wineries of Hawkes Bay and jump on a jetboat on the Dart River near Queenstown.

Burgess says the "100 per cent pure" Tourism New Zealand promotion has been well received in a Britain now reeling from the foot- and-mouth epidemic.

The Guardian ran eight features on New Zealand in the past year; more than its size probably warranted but indicating the interest in Down Under holidays.

Although some Britons still had an image of New Zealand as their homeland 30 years ago, it was being replaced by pictures of adventure and clean-green countryside.

(The collapse of the New Zealand cricket team in the first test against Pakistan did bring a taste of home failures past to Burgess, even as England emerges as a new cricketing force.)

Australia was still a big drawcard with British travellers, particularly after the Olympic success. Other hot destinations for Guardian readers included Vietnam, Cambodia, Brazil, Oman and Jordan.

Burgess says he cringes at the cultural colonisation of some parts of Europe by the archetypal Brit package tourist, and it brought out an old dilemma. "You spend your whole time trying to find new places to go to, and the second you write about it, you end up buggering it up."

Burgess hails from Cumbria, in England's north-west, made famous by its Lake District. Two of its lesser-known attractions are Old Cock Up bitter, produced by a mini-brewery in which Burgess holds "liquid" shares, and Carlisle United Football Club.

For the past three years they have been 91st of the 92 teams in the English professional leagues. Two years ago - in a moment he puts among the best in his life - on-loan goalkeeper Jimmy Glass came up for a corner four minutes into injury time in the last match of the season and famously scored to keep Carlisle up.

This month, though, as Burgess basks in a late summer, his beloved team are again facing a bleak future in 23rd, one point clear of relegation.

Oh well, you can't have the best job in the world and follow the best team.

Typical of journalists, by the end of the interview Burgess is asking the questions. Where are the best places to go in Auckland? Is K Rd worth a look? Why are oil tanks spoiling the waterfront?

Guardian readers will be seeing the answers soon.