Sky's the limit for the dream teen

For the ultimate in 'cool parent' kudos, experience the excitement of an adventure holiday with your teenage children. British Guild of Travel Writers' 'Travel Writer of the Year 2005', Martin Symington, tells you where to catch the fun.

Do you yearn to trek through steaming rainforests alive with whistles, clacks and yowls? To rumble across deserts? View the northern lights? Or perhaps watch wildlife in the wilderness? Kids may have been the reason for dreaming rather than packing when they were tiny. But once they have outgrown the beach and ice cream stage, it is the other way round. As the parent of a trio in their teens, I can vouch that holidays filled with activities and excitement are the best things you can possibly do with energy levels driven high by teenage hormones.

Adventure. The outdoors. Thinking of things that challenge them physically, that encourage them to go wild at the thrill of travelling to far-flung places and experiencing nature in the raw. This is the stuff that attracts teenage accolades like: ... it totally rocks, awesome, a legend, best ever, lush, cool. We are talking about an age group too young to backpack independently through Tibet or Bolivia, but way beyond the bucket-and-spade staples of the traditional family holiday.

During a holiday in the jet-set Emirate of Dubai, for example, we headed into the Arabian desert in a 4X4, soaring up ridges of red sand, to slew down in side-slipping skids through the dunes that roll away towards Oman and Yemen. Then we sampled 'sandboarding', making slalom turns on adapted snowboards, down into a sandy gully. In curious counterpoint to its snowy parallel, we found that in this wacky, newfangled sport, there is a strong incentive not to fall on scorching sand before reaching the respite of the air-conditioned vehicle at the bottom.

On safari in southern Africa, we shared airspace with fish eagles on our way to remote camps where we would experience Africa at its wildest: endless expanses of parched, golden grassland where we drove through a thousand-strong herd of buffalo, while antelope fled to the horizons. There was a magical moment when we watched a golden-maned lion rise purposefully to his feet and squat (remarkably briefly, it must be said) over a crouching lioness. And another when, sitting silently under the stars, we watched a leopard crouch under a thorn bush, then spring at the throat of an unsuspecting impala just feet away. Are teenagers already exposed to too much sex and violence in the modern world? Well for us, this flashpoint of convergence beauty and brutality, was to provide our family's most enduring memory of Africa.

Along with the places and experiences described on the pages following, these are a few of the heart-stopping adventures we have had in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America. The teenagers return home fizzing with feel-good factor, and aching for more...

Martin Symington