There's a golden rule for holidays: fear the worst and the worst will happen. Kevin Barry has a few tips for the anxious

There are two types of tourist. There's the nervous type, the one who checks in seven hours before take-off, just to be on the safe side, and passes the time by reading about deep-vein thrombosis and musing about potential hostage situations. And then there's the other type - and here he comes now, dashing with last-minute panache along the concourse. A cheeky smile plays about his serene features. The ground crew chuckle. They have long kept the gates open and the aircraft on the ground, its windows full of the moon-faced poor fools who checked in seven hours back.

For the nervous tourist things go from bad to worse when we land at our sultry destination. Shaken by a suspected mid-air dose of deep-vein thrombosis, he is then delivered by cruel fate into the hands of a deranged taxi-driver, a homicidal sheen over his half-blind eyes, who refuses to drive to the right hotel. "Is no good," he says. "I know good hotel, is good friend of mine, yes? We go now!"

Mr Panache, meanwhile, has found the wise and wry old cabbie with the inside track on the local hot spots. As they coast away through the tropical air you just know he will go down a storm with the locals, who will reverently dub him el Tigro Blanco: the White Tiger

As someone who scrawls travel articles for a crust, I might be expected to fall into the latter category, surmounting the obstacles of even the most hazardous journeys with blithe indifference.

But no. I'm a pathologically nervous tourist. I'm fretful, suspicious, paranoid, shy and deeply unsociable when on the move. There is no limit to the number of times I pat my pockets at the airport to check on tickets, passport, wallet.

The physical dangers of travelling bother me deeply. In the air I worry about loss of cabin pressure or a bird in the engine. On a train I grimly picture a points failure. On a coach I endure portents about jackknifed artics or slicks of black ice on the motorway.

I become terribly confused. Through utter fear I once mucked up my travel arrangements to the extent that I had to spend four days at a Moroccan ferry port suffering clinical malnutrition. The hallucinations haunt me yet.

But the nervous tourist must take due heed, for there is an incontrovertible rule of travel: fear the worst and the worst will happen. The confident souls who journey more in expectation than in hope usually find that things work out just fine. It is generally about attitude.

So nervous tourists have no option but to try to change their ways. But how do you conquer the nerves? Knowledge is power: know all you possibly can about your destination. The following points may be of some assistance:

• The Internet search engine Google is the fount of all modern knowledge and has revolutionised holidaymaking. The more wilfully obscure the information you seek the better. I pretended I was off to the Mongolian capital and googled "Ulan Bator restaurants". I promptly had details of several dozen, although I was warned by one blogger that "people do not generally come to Mongolia for the food" and that I would be served "mainly mutton, washed down with a salty tea".

• Nervous travellers are likely also to be accomplished hypochondriacs, with many of their holiday worries concerning dangers to health. The Mid-Western Health Board has some useful advice on travel health on its website. Go to www.mwhb.ie, then click on Good Health and, on the next page, Travel.

• If you find yourself at the centre of a diplomatic incident you'll want the boys in the suits from the Embassy on your side - although the Department of Foreign Affairs offers advice designed to keep you clear of such incidents in the first place. Go to www.irlgov.ie/iveagh and click on Travelling Abroad.

• Remember that guidebooks are only so useful. They are written from research that is going to be a year or two out of date by the time you come to use it. The latest editions of both Lonely Planet: Spain and The Rough Guide To Spain, for example, fail to point out that the main theatre for petty crime in Barcelona has moved from the now well- policed Ramblas to trendier, outlying areas such as Montjuic.

• The old rule about finding a good place to eat still holds: follow the locals. In particular, keep your eyes peeled for fat businessmen. As they eat out daily, you can benefit from the homing instinct of their lunchtime gluttony.

• Blend in seamlessly by checking out the community noticeboard at the local supermarket. These provide a snapshot of a town's mindset. I did this last year in Ithaca, a hotbed of beard-stroking radicalism in upstate New York, and so found myself chowing down at a free buffet at the house of a woman called Kelly. She was a deeply intense lady who began to weep copiously as she extolled the benefits of a raw-food diet.

• Don't forget the blindingly obvious stuff, such as never wandering down badly lit alleyways scuttered drunk at four in the morning and trying not to break into building sites to operate heavy machinery while under the influence of powerful tranquillisers.

• If all fails and you find yourself in a panic, breathe deeply, fall into a foetal ball on the ground and moan attractively until you are rescued by kindly passing strangers. It works for me, usually.