If we couldn’t imagine the history via a map, the next day we were in it - at Xanthos, the ancient capital of Lycia, where, in Roman times, Marcus Brutus had clanked and snorted his angry way along the very street we were standing in. “Am I actually standing on the same stones, Daddy? Cooool.”

After all the grisly stories of slaughter and mass suicide, it was almost a relief to hop in a canoe and hightail it down the River Xanthos. We had a blissful couple of hours of paddling and turtle-spotting ... until we hit mud. Getting muddy is an adventure for all children, but they were about to meet the daddy of all things muddy - a fully matured, 200 sq ft sulphurous pond of slop. With complete abandon, they all turned themselves into little chocolate humans, closely followed by the slightly less enthusiastic adults. Back in the sun, we completed our strange experience by crisping over.

Throughout our adventure, the children were all doing 8am to midnight straight. Evenings were as adventurous as the days - browsing markets, eating alfresco in restaurants hidden down alleyways and so on. Their evening highlight was me volunteering for a shave. Because it wasn’t simply a shave: it was a shave, a massage and a beating. I should have guessed from the guy in the next chair being donkey-punched between the scapulas that this was no ordinary barber. In the mirror, I could see the girls looking worried.

“Daddy, is he going to do that to you?” Immie asked. At which point, Berber Oktay set light to my ear hair, then belted me around the head to extinguish the flame before pulling all my fingers out of their sockets.

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How we all laughed.

Even on our day off, we couldn’t avoid adventure. “Buyukcakil,” a local fisherman said - not a Borat-style greeting, but the name of the beach we just had to go to.

“Two kilometrass,” said our man, pointing with a leathery finger. We stopped at a beachy store to buy goggles and confirm the “Buyukcakil” thing.

“My friend will take you,” said the shopkeeper.

“How much?” I asked fearfully.

“Is free,” he said. Naturally, at the other end, I offered the driver some cash.

“No,” he said. “Is free.” We were greeted like old friends by Ilyas and Sadik, who own Buyukcakil’s beach bar - brothers of the shopkeeper? But there was no catch. In fact, our whole group returned at Ilyas’s invitation later in the trip for an evening of eating and drinking. Accompanied by the hiss of waves draining through pebbles and a crackling fire, we sat at our own private table for 15 - not another soul on the beach. The sun exited stage right and the kids poked the fire that lit our table, while the adults drank raki - WHOA-A - and snaffled the last meatballs. What an evening, what a trip.

“Maybees next year coming, same party, no problems,” Sadik said. Yes, maybees.

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