Do you know what to do if you are stung by a jellyfish? Or how to reduce your chances of contracting malaria? Ann Noon had no idea until she went on a travel medicine course

It was day two of a seven-month trip of a lifetime around South-east Asia and I was already in trouble. The lure of Bali's Kuta beach had won against the jet lag and we lay comatose in the midday sun, factor 30 smeared everywhere. Except for one very important place. Four hours and two coconut thirst-quenchers later, I was the not-so-proud owner of matching second-degree burns on the tops of both feet. Red-raw and badly blistered, they proceeded to swell to twice their normal size and I spent the whole of the next day standing in a bucket of water while my companions whooped it up on Kuta's neon bar strip. Camomile lotion, after-sun cream; you name it, I tried it. Anything to soothe the pain. I even tried puncturing the blisters with one of the needles from our first aid kit.

Ten years on and I now know that I broke every rule in the medical book, except perhaps for standing in the bucket. At an illuminating one-day Explorer Medicine course run by the Aldershot-based Adventure Lifesigns group, we were told never to apply creams to burns, or to burst blisters. We were then told that in Madagascar, burns are sometimes treated by rubbing faeces into the skin - just one of many, er, helpful tips that we picked up.

More helpful tips here