Enter our competition to win a
magical travel experience
Life ... oh, sorry, an after-dinner limoncello has a way of tilting one towards the philosophical ... is a succession of happy accidents. Or unhappy accidents, but this is not the section of the Herald that deals with bad news. You're way past the Money pages.
Happy accidents have led Jude and I to a table dressed in Saturday-best linen, with silvered cutlery, glasses shimmering, a candle doing its best to flicker in the breeze and an early summer sunset. To a terrace above a valley of palms, climbers and trees, with fantails, rosellas, partridges and tui circling and squawking.
It is just December. The road here began in October, when Jude's professional peers presented her with an award. The prize was travel within New Zealand. Respecting the inspiration and support, she decided on a girls' weekend with her mother and dogs.
We searched and researched and decided on a weekend in the Bay of Plenty. Accommodation options seemed, we wearily realised, to be two- or three-bedrooms 'n' breakfasts in ever-so-chintzy homes in Tauranga or nearby.
Until we came upon Fantail Lodge in the Katikati foothills. "It doesn't have sea views," I cited one of the priorities. "It has more than enough of everything else," Jude said. "Book it."
There was one more decision, which strangely fell to me, disqualified from the weekend. "Saturday night dinner?" asked Jude. "Somerset Cottage," I suggested.
Which would have been fine but it was full. "Bugger," or something similar, Jude said to the nice man at the lodge. "We can cook dinner here," he told her.
"What's on the menu tonight?" she asked. "We have lamb and fish and beef," he told her.
"Lamb sounds good," Jude said. "I'll go and bone it out," he replied.
For a month I heard much about that lamb dinner. Enough. "We're going to Fantail Lodge for the weekend," I said to Jude one night.
Which brought us to that twilight above Katikati. Barbara Geraerts had welcomed us to the family's mock-Tudor lodge, walked us around the strelitzia groves, showed us the kiwifruit pollen farm, the citrus, the avocado, for this is as much a working and exporting farm as a conference or wedding venue and spa.
We unpacked in a villa, one of two ringing a field of birds and bunnies. There'll be 10 as soon as the council and bank manager sign the paperwork; the builders are ready to go.
Harrie, Barbara's husband, chef and co-owner, confirmed the problem trying to find a place to stay in the Bay.
"There are 49 lodges between Katikati and Ohope," he told me. "Most are spare bedrooms in modern houses around Mt Maunganui and Papamoa.
"When they get to three bedrooms, it becomes much more expensive. They have to meet OSH requirements, and pay commercial rates for fire insurance and so on."
Harrie is too passionate about his district and too loyal to say so, but after talking with other local entrepreneurs, I connect the dots: they feel this could be a bay of plenty, that there is much for locals and tourists to see and do and appreciate, especially as the port develops and more cruise ships call. They wonder if the local tourism organisation is up to the challenge.
Harrie ranks his business - out-of-town conferences 1; weddings 2; Auckland weekenders 3. Let's hear it for romance: Fantail Lodge has booked as many weddings for summer '09 as for the whole of last year.
Enough business. Time for dinner, where our walk through the garden shows on the dishes.
This classically European-trained, 32-year veteran of the cuisine and hospitality trades struts all over the platter that begins our meal. Seafood. Sushi. Salmon tails. Chicken in ginger. Smoked venison. His own chutneys, estate-grown gherkins, artichokes, caperberries and olives. That'll be why they call this "the Tuscany of New Zealand", then.
Tonight there are three choices of main course. Snapper. Well, that's out. It was the fish of the afternoon, with chips and (responsibly low-alcohol) beers, at the Hot Pipi café just down the highway in Waihi Beach at lunchtime. There's also chicken ballotine, rolled and stuffed into the classic recipe with Kiwi herbal refinements. Boiled new potatoes. That's Jude, died and gone to Katikati.
Or ... I salivate - surely lamb, I've been hearing about nothing else for weeks ... Harrie offers venison tenderloin, mandarin sauce, rosti. I try to hide my disappointment. I try really, really hard to hide my disappointment. When he tells me, much later in the evening, or possibly the early morning, about his hunting trips (so many exotic predators lay waste to the countryside that they must be culled for the good of local wildlife), I understand that it is a
far, far better thing that I have eaten.
Dessert? But of course. A tasting platter of chocolate for Jude: a memorable mousse in a lattice-spiced apple cake. Lemon sorbet for me, with a wee thimble of - I am becoming philosophical.
Memories, always memories. On Sunday, after Harrie cooked a restrained four-course breakfast and showed us the planned development, we left for the Mount.
Jude was looking forward to it. Like so many Hamilton kids, she and brother Tony spent their summer holidays there - Pilot Bay, around the cone, the surf beach, the sandhills. A bach. The wharves. Fishing. Hokey-pokey ice creams. She had not been back in 40 years. She was not prepared for 20km of high-rise apartments, timeshares, gated communities. At Papamoa's big-box stores and fast-food joints, we gave up on lunch.
We could have gone back into Tauranga. Most of the restaurants and cafes in the port city consult Harrie Geraerts. He devises the menus, provides the staff, co-ordinates the whole shebang.
Much better to taste it on a terrace, above a valley of palms and climbers and trees, with fantails and tui and partridges. Even if there's no lamb that night.
www.fantaillodge.co.nz
