I took my "grand tour" of Europe at age 19, centuries ago. My 20-year-old son, Rafe, is now planning a similar journey, solo mostly, hugging the shores of the Mediterranean.
I, as his mother, have been dredging up the many cautionary tales I've collected on my own travels.
My top piece of advice is to avoid being drugged. It's in Egypt and India - and retelling these stories now, I feel like a real chump. But here goes.
I never should have fallen for the first character, given that I actually lived in Egypt for two years in the mid-'80s, and was well schooled in the Cairo hustle.I'd gone back a few years later for another dose of the country's incomparable antiquities, riding Arab horses around the Pyramids, and floating down the Nile in a felucca.
I'd taken the train south to Luxor from Cairo, without booking any accommodation. Luckily a fellow traveller - a reserved but kind British woman, like me, barely 30 at the time - had taken pity on me and invited me to crash on the sofa in her elegant room at the Winter Palace, the grande dame of Luxor's hotels.
We'd checked in, left our bags, and had ventured out onto the corniche, the lovely boulevard along the river, when some tout approached us and asked if we wanted to view some antiquities for sale on the West Bank, where all the dead lie in the Valleys of Kings and Queens.
This was at dusk, so a dodgy prospect, but we went along.With the sun setting over the desert honeycombed with ancient tombs, we crossed the Nile and soon arrived at the Valley of Kings Hotel, an innocuous rectangle of white plaster with its name crudely painted in black on the front wall.
Rushing to greet us was Ahmed, the owner, he said, though he couldn't have been older than 25.
He whisked us upstairs to an open-air terrace, and tables full of the aforementioned "antiquities" - miniature clay Queen Nefertiti heads, King Tut masks, and small replicas of every god in the Egyptian pantheon.
"Authentic reproductions," Ahmed announced proudly, and then sat us down at a table and ordered drinks.
I cannot even remember what they were, but I recall their effects.
My British friend cottoned on to the situation quickly, panicked, and announced that she wanted to leave. After some slippery pleading from Ahmed, he let her go, and a waiter escorted her out. I never found out what happened to her.I stayed. I drank more. And by the time my self-defences kicked in, I said I'd spend the night but I wanted to retire.
They gave me a spartan room, a bed in a shed, and I bolted the door from the inside. I tried to sleep but in the hot darkness I began to see visions, not unlike the climactic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the disturbed spirits fly around in a frenzy after the Ark of the Covenant's lid is lifted - except my spirits looked more like Tutankhamun.
Morning came and I rushed down to the river, where I found a lone boatman, eerily waiting to take me across the River Styx. Wrong story, wrong river.
He delivered me back to the other bank, intact, and I went straight to the train station.
As for the India drugging incident, let's just say I was older but no wiser. I fell in again with some nefarious salesmen (Indian miniature paintings this time), and on the banks of the lake in Pushkar was doped up with a laced lassi. I managed to escape, wandering back to my cheap hotel through dark alleys full of wolves and witches.
Or so it seemed at the time.
To this day, I still wonder. 
• Do you have a funny or quirky story about your travels? Send 600 words to travelmag@sundaytimes.co.za and include a recent photograph of yourself for publication with the column...