Above, the family swim for a watermelon treat in the sea; and top left, the writer’s daughter, Natalie Cencelli, enjoys the view as they motor back to the Göcek marina after a day of sailing in the Bay of Fethiye

HEN our children were younger we travelled rough in Turkey, on the local buses and taxis, often with smelly sheep at our feet and chickens in the overhead luggage racks.

This year we returned to Turkey for another family holiday, with our adult children and their children. Turkey, too, we found, has grown up and developed.

We had been invited to Göcek on the Aegean coast, to share a rented house (in Europe they are grandly called “villas”) for two weeks.

Göcek is a modern invention and something of a restoration town. Chromium was mined in the hills, but when the mines closed the village was developed into a sailing destination with six smart yacht marinas. A new freeway winds its way along the coast. Some years ago the place was proclaimed an area for “special protection”, with building strictly regulated: nothing over two storeys.

This modern village is, as a result, a somewhat film-set type of place. Carefully planned with very pretty pedestrian walkways, ship chandlers, shops selling leisure gear and many seafront fish restaurants. It’s a safe place for children to run about freely, and at night under the coloured lights families strolled around.

There is a particularly good shop selling towels and linen that we visited regularly; the owner was one of the few female shopkeepers we came across. She was always obliging with her prices.

The Turks love to haggle and seem offended if you don’t enter into the spirit of the negotiations. Negotiation is quite the thing at the Saturday- morning market just outside town. Here you can buy your weekly produce from stalls groaning under piles of fruit, vegetables, cheese, eggs and honey, all brought in by farmers from the surrounding area. There was even a large area under canvas selling clothing at the most ridiculously cheap prices; all good quality, too.

The village, beneath gently swelling hills covered in pines, is at the top of the triangle formed by the Bay of Fethiye on the aptly named Turquoise Coast.

Here the sailing is benign and dozens of little islands offer myriad bays and coves where you can anchor and swim. For young boys, this is a place to play pirates or snorkel like a character from a James Bond movie.

When you see the impossibly clear colours of the sea around this coastline, it is easy to understand why, over the centuries, the Turks have used vivid blues, greens and shades of turquoise on the tiles decorating buildings such as the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace.

To get to Göcek, we flew directly from Cape Town to Istanbul. From there it was a short flight to