Taking a Turkish bath with my teenage son did not rate particularly highly among parenthood’s rites of passage.

It hardly helped that Thomas, 13 and already dreaming of his first motorbike, wanted to go jet-skiing instead. But there we were, in the Turkish resort of Bodrum, and I was intent on interspersing the hedonism with a few cultural experiences we could share.

So we paid our entry fee and stepped into the dim, steamy underworld hammam. We lay on a hot marble slab, perspired, lathered ourselves in soap, tipped buckets of water over each other’s heads and then got rubbed down by a weightlifter wielding an oven glove made of reeds.

In the space of a few short minutes the masseur managed effectively to remove the results of a whole week’s careful tanning.

Gumusluk, a sheltered natural harbour on the western peninsular has a laid-back, hippy ambience

Afterwards, sitting in the daylight, mummified in towels and sipping tea, Thomas – no fan of hot water and soap at the best of times – turned to me and enquired: “What was the point of that, exactly?” I spun him my line about cultural experiences and then we went off in search of a jet-ski.

When I first came 20 years ago to this knobble on the knee of south-western Turkey, the Bodrum peninsula was still remote enough to be a haunt for travellers and yachties. These days, however, it has its own airport and has become the Turkish Monaco with extensive nightlife, designer retailing and ever-increasing numbers of upmarket hotels.

Thomas, 13 and already dreaming of his first motorbike, wanted to go jet-skiing instead.

The fabulous harbour usually hosts a cruise liner or two, moored beneath the walls of the castle of St Peter, and the surrounding hills are braided with new villa developments. There is even a giant new Tesco, called Kipa.

All this change has certainly made the traffic worse and raised prices but there is no denying that this is an exciting, happening place and still one where – as with the hammam – you can choose to dip in and out of Turkish life.

Once we had satisfied our shopping itch for cheap watches, jeans and jewellery and exchanged luvvly-jubbly patter with wily old shopkeepers who had seen it all before, we took a hire car and started to explore.

The bay next door to Bodrum is Gumbet, the location for most of the international hotels. It is generously sandy and ideal for families – or at least those happy to exist on fish and chips and keen to do their sunbathing in the company of other Brits.

In Bitez, the next bay along, we found more of a mix of people and the watersports prices were more competitive. This is where Thomas did his jet-skiing, although his age did not allow him to ride solo. He was disappointed; his parents were not.

Inland, things became suddenly far more Turkish in nature. The landscape is steep and quite arid, dotted with old peasant villages built many centuries ago to be out of harm’s way from piratical raids from Greek islands such
as Kos and Kalymnos, which lie just offshore.

Here there are still old ladies bent into the quarter-to-six position among their cactus gardens and old gents riding donkeys home after a day at market. The views of sea and land are spectacular and in spring or autumn it would be good to try some of the trails that loop around the hills – but in mid-summer it was simply too hot.

In the end, the place we liked most was a sheltered natural harbour called Gumusluk, on the western edge of the peninsula. Despite the rapid development elsewhere, this is still something of a travellers’ and locals’ hangout with a laid-back, slightly hippy ambience.

Small pensions covered with bougainvillea stand right at the water’s edge, interspersed with the ramshackle cafés where you can feast on mezze – the Turkish equivalent of tapas – of mushrooms, aubergines, pine nuts, hummus, fava beans, anchovies and octopus.

During the day we rented a pedalo and used it as a dive boat to go snorkelling over the underwater ruins of the ancient Greek settlement of Mindos, at Gumusluk’s harbour entrance.

We then watched a glassblower create little coloured figurines and waded along a short underwater causeway to Rabbit Island, which was just what its name suggested.

In the evening, Gumusluk became rather more formal. Those mezze cafés hauled their tables down to the water’s edge and set them up with wine glasses and napkins. And the main parade of fish restaurants arranged glorious displays of bass, bream, tuna and grouper.

Sitting there, surrounded bythe sophisticates of Bodrum who drive out  for an aperitif before the serious nightlife begins, we felt the satisfaction of being in the right place, at the right time. Quite a rare experience in our family.