It might be a crock, but this is one of the most fun things I do on holiday

The Sri Lankan fortune-teller didn’t look anything like I expected.

For start, he wasn’t dressed in robes or covered in mystical jewellery. He wasn’t sitting cross-legged in a dimly lit room invoking spirit guides.

Kasun looked like an IT guy in his neat polo shirt and pants. We might have been conducting a job interview. If he was going to use any sleight of hand, we were in a light room, where I’d be able to see everything clearly.

It was sleight of hand, in a way. He asked me my age, took my right palm, and began to draw lines on it in blue biro, tracing the major lines and then crossing them with dashes after he’d made calculations. After a short while, my hand looked like a map of some remote desert outpost.

I can’t say I’m very superstitious, but I’m quite partial to a bit of soothsaying. I rarely take it too seriously, but when it’s on offer, I usually sign up. I have a friend in Sydney who is very good at tarot cards, which surprises her as much as it does her circle of friends. I do think an empathetic ability is a gift, whether or not it’s a believable way of seeing into the future, and I’m always open to meeting people who have it.

Ladies in dingy parlours in gypsy costume aside, fortune-telling is entrenched in almost every culture. In Hong Kong, if you visit Temple Street, you can find a seer who will divine your future via Kau Chim, an ancient method where a bamboo bucket is filled with flat sticks that have numbers inscribed on them, and fortunes are interpreted by reading the sticks that fall out when the subject shakes the bucket.

Japan offers something similar, Omikuji, reading fortune from numbered sticks. In Korea, it’s Saju, a method not unlike astrology, based on your date, time and place of birth. The Chinese read your face. In Turkey, they read the sludge at the bottom of your coffee cup. Indians follow Jyotish, a 10,000-year-old form of astrology, which differs from Western astrology in using a chart of fixed stars, not moving ones.

Fortune-telling is entwined in the culture of the Romani, who practise tea-leaf reading, palmistry, tarot and crystal-ball divination. The Greeks have been practising palm reading, or chiromancy, since before Aristotle, who became fascinated by it, as did his pupil, Alexander the Great.

Even though fortune-telling is a worldwide pastime, it has also been used by scammers over thousands of years to separate people from their wallets. Most sensible travellers stay clear of strangers luring them into dark shopfronts with the promise of revealing all about their one true love or future riches.