Get to love Turkey

Barnaby Rogerson reveals how he keeps his family happy on holiday while he drags them around for his research work Bargaining starts early in our family. Usually over the breakfast table. Having brought up my two daughters on travels across Turkey, I do not wish to complain, nor sound proud that we do a lot of in-house trading. It has just happened that way. I am a travel writer and so is my wife Rose. We took Molly, the elder of our two rosebuds, on her first press-trip when she was a three-month-old breast-fed baby. We did the classic carrycot-and-backpack tour of the ancient cities of Caria, repeated the next year on the Lycian shore, then again when we spent a couple of months of guide-book writing based in an old wooden house in Istanbul, not to mention the fortnight in a very swanky Bodrum hotel – all this before Rose or her younger sister Hannah had so much as set foot in nursery school. Naturally, travelling with small children, you start factoring in some play time with the pay-back task of sightseeing. The problem is that my cover is blown. Both my daughters spotted that I was obsessive. Any attempt at sounding down-in-the-mouth – “Oh dear, I have to go and work; poor Dada has to track down a late-Byzantine church and a ruined oracle of Apollo before he can have lunch” – just doesn’t wash. continue