Why kids need real adventure

Last spring my husband and I took my twenty-something brother-in-law Drew and his girlfriend to Venice. It was time, my husband thought, that his American-college-educated younger brother got to know his bellinis from his carpaccios.

As we purred through the backstreets in our water-taxi, ducking our heads beneath the bridges, the familiar smell of fecal coliform invading the nostrils, our voices echoing against 15th century stone, Drew looked amazed. "It's just like Tomb Raider," he said.

He was winding me up - but only partly. For the post-modern IT generation it is almost impossible not to see new places in the world as virtual reality.

The world's great destinations - its cities, harbours, pyramids, deserts, mountains, jungles - have become the stuff of Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound, digitally manipulated, visually enhanced, supersaturated, Technicolor imaging.

How can the humble parent compete when it comes to family holidays? The answer, prodded by Disney, is more of the same - theme parks where you can visit Mexico, Japan and Morocco in the same day; where you can be strapped in your seat and be given the ride of your life, all with minimal planning, effort or discomfort (or so they say).

Or, if you're worried about the little couch potatoes whose physical proclivity is limited to the pulsations of a trigger-finger, then you're exhorted to try the " wilderness" experience of Center Parcs, with organised activities in the Jungle Dome or Foam Factory, or wall-to-wall watersports at a Mark Warner.

But what these child-friendly, vacuum-packed, fast holidays overlook, what they can never, ever hope to synthesise, is the romance, the mystery, the atmosphere, the subterranean tempo, the absolute uniqueness of the real thing. A self-serve cafeteria can't supply the prickle to the nostrils of a South American chilli stall or the sea-smell of freshly caught Cornish mackerel.

Stand on a sand dune in the Namib or knee-deep in heather on a Scottish ben, and you are assaulted by a concoction of sensations so complex and evocative that it will linger on somewhere in your cortex forever, haunting you, provoking you, subtly changing you, though you may not know how or why.

And that, to me, is what real-life adventures can inspire - a yearning for something other, for the inexplicable, for the beautiful, the wild or the original; an appreciation of the genuine article. And for children more than anyone - who are more adaptable, more willing and more able than parents or the family-holiday industry probably ever give them credit for - it's about arousing the senses rather than gratifying them, providing something that makes the spirit stir and that lazy, self-contented imagination sit up and scratch its head.

All too often, though, we resist the challenge of adventurous travel on the grounds of safety - our children are too young or inexperienced, too vulnerable. But our notions of what is safe are muddled with what is familiar. We're happy to drive our children at 70mph around the M25, yet feel that sitting on a camel may be hazardous to their health.

Only by travelling adventurously can children start to put this false sense of security into perspective and learn some independence of their own. It doesn't necessarily mean travelling to the ends of the earth or forking out a vast fortune to find it. The spirit of adventure is as available in an Italian piazza as it is on the top of a pyramid; on a Hebridean beach as in a Berber tent.

But it does mean pushing the boat out just a little bit further - taking your holiday by the horns and getting out into the real world before Lara Croft and Snow White invade your children's grey cells with their version.

Isabella Tree's latest book, Sliced Iguana - Travels in Mexico, is published this week by Penguin paperback, price £7.99.