By Brigid Schulte
As I stood in the basket of the hot air balloon at dawn in the fantastical landscape of Cappadocia, Turkey, clutching my 13-year-old daughter’s arm in terror, I realised that this is the very reason why travelling with teenagers can be such an adventure. Just as they so expertly know how to push your buttons at home, they can also push you out of your comfort zone on a trip. Sometimes way, way out.
I’m terrified of heights. My son, Liam, who decided to sleep in that morning at the Kale Konak Cave Hotel in Uchisar, also gets a little queasy when he’s too high off the ground. But my daughter, Tessa, like her father, Tom, is a daredevil.
So as the colourful balloons filled with helium on that chilly February morning, as my teeth chattered with cold and fear, she flung her arms around her father with a childlike joyful abandon I hadn’t seen in years. Ah, I thought, there she is. I knew she was still in there under that growly teen who thinks I’m a dork.
The Voyager hot air balloon ride turned out to be a gentle, magical float above valleys filled with “fairy chimneys” — tall, thin spires of stone — and ancient settlements cut into the rock. Tom, Tessa and I were just as giddy from the experience as any high we’d get from the champagne the pilots served after we landed. But honestly, for me, the real magic was that we shared the adventure together.
When Tom and I decided that we’d take our two sometimes surly teenagers along with us on a business trip to Turkey, I had a dreaded vision: the two of them stretched out on their respective beds in some charmless chain hotel in Istanbul, ordering hamburgers off the room service menu while plugged into their iPhones watching Netflix, disconnected from us and oblivious to the strange and swirling new world around them.
So the first decision I made, while it cost us financially, turned out to be one of the best: I turned down the all-expenses-paid accommodations in a five-star hotel in the modern business district offered by the organisers of the conference where I’d be speaking. Instead, I surfed the Internet until I found a small, quirky and wonderful little boutique hotel — five old townhouses really — set around a lovely courtyard and the ruins of a 15th-century hamam, or Turkish bath.
The Hotel Empress Zoe, named for a colourful grande dame of the Byzantine era immortalized in one of the breathtaking golden mosaics in the 6th-century Hagia Sophia, was right in the heart of the old city, in the Sultanahmet neighbourhood. It was just a short walk up winding, cobblestone streets to the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, the Topkapi Palace, home of the Ottoman sultans for 400 years, and that strange and swirling new world I wanted us all to see.
The next best decision turned out to be serendipitous: We had brought only one adapter. That meant that everyone’s gadgets — our four iPhones, two laptops and an iPad — all died slow, battery-draining deaths. And Liam and Tessa found out the hard way that Netflix isn’t available in Turkey.
That meant our teenagers had to talk to us. At least some of the time.
We felt the difference almost immediately. Arriving into Istanbul after a long Turkish Airlines flight late in the evening, we left our dead devices in the family-style room at the Empress Zoe — we shared two bedrooms, a small kitchenette and a bathroom with its own marble hamam — and wandered up the street to the Aloran Cafe and Restaurant. “Hello nice family!” the host called, and began bringing heaping plates of the most delicious meze, or appetisers, of hummus, olive oil, feta and olives, followed by lamb kebabs, rice and baskets of warm, poofy pita bread just out of the oven.
Soon, we found ourselves laughing, joking and telling stories. The kids gamely tried baklava and gooey Turkish Delight for dessert and were sent home with blue glass evil eye trinkets by our friendly waiter. “It’s nice not to have you nag about homework,” Tessa said on the way out the door. Note to self: Shut up about homework around the dinner table.
We walked the winding streets after dinner, admiring the oddly shaped gourds that had been turned into festive lamps with brightly coloured lights. We ducked into a carpet shop.
When the kids tired of the spectacle and wanted to go back to the hotel, Tom and I let them. It wasn’t far. And the beauty of travelling with teens clamouring for more independence is that they were finally old enough to have a measure of it.
We planned the trip in the same spirit. We knew we wouldn’t have much time — seven days in all — and we wanted everyone’s input so that we wouldn’t fly halfway around the world only to have the kids treat this trip as another lame attempt at Forced Family Fun.
I spread travel books and maps around the kitchen table and called up websites. Tessa voted for the hot air balloons of Cappadocia. Liam wanted to see Troy, but once we discovered there wasn’t a lot left of it to see, we settled on visiting the ruins of Ephesus, which date to the 10th century BC. On the day I would be working, Tom had planned a trip to Gallipoli, where a young Mustafa Kemal battled British, Australian and New Zealand troops in World War I. And I wanted to do three things: Go to a Turkish bath. Buy spices in the spice bazaar. And see whirling dervishes.
We learned that even on a trip abroad, you can push teens only so far. They were game for a Turkish bath at the elegant Ayasofya Hurrem Sultan Hamam, built in 1556 and renovated in 2011, just across the square from the Hagia Sophia, though none of us knew quite what to expect. (The kids thought having someone scrub off all your dead skin was weird. Getting a massage on heated marble covered in bubbles was OK.)
And they patiently sat through the mesmerizing Sema worship ceremony of whirling dervishes at the 13th-century Sultanhan Caravanserai on the Silk Road between Aksaray and Konya.
But getting lost on the way to the spice bazaar after visiting the Grand Bazaar pushed them both over the edge. Getting lost, to me, can be one of the greatest pleasures of travel — you never know what you’ll discover. But they were hungry, cold and tired and had already schlepped around a lot that day. “Why do you want spices anyway? You never cook!” (I bought saffron. I’m going to use it. Watch me.)
So we got smarter. We scaled back on the sightseeing to give everyone more downtime, yes, even limited time with their anaemically charged devices. We stayed in another family room at the lovely Nisanyan Houses and Hotel in the mountain village of Sirince. We got in late in the evening after a long day seeing the stunningly beautiful ruins of Ephesus. So, over a delicious meal of steak, roasted chicken and potatoes and pasta for our vegetarian daughter in the cozy dining room, we decided not to leave at the crack of dawn the next day as planned. We stayed up late playing backgammon in front of the fire in our room. And the next morning, as the kids got some rest, Tom and I took an early morning walk around the village among peacocks, roosters and one insistently loud donkey.
And we made sure seeing sights didn’t become a To Do List to slog through. When we visited the ruins of the ancient spa city of Hierapolis, we made sure we had enough time to wade in the blindingly white calcite thermal pools of Pamukkale, and to swim in the outdoor thermal Cleopatra Pool, studded with Greek and Roman columns, which, though touristy, was a lot of fun. In Cappadocia, when we finished a hike through the otherworldly Red Valley, we left plenty of time for a long lunch at the Old Greek House in Mustafapasa. And on a visit to a ceramic factory, we took our time so the kids could try their hands at the pottery wheel.
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