Wonderful career, tourism. But how many of us remember that?

I thought of this last week when I spent an awesome Sunday with Allan Robertson at his Stonehill Restaurant, in Little Brak River, near Mossel Bay - and realised that if I hadn’t been in tourism, I probably wouldn’t have been there.

See, we’d come to watch the filming of an episode for a cooking series with chef Pablo Massey for elGourmet.com (a web site and TV channel that broadcasts to all the South American countries - that’s 350 million people, by the way, 16 million of whom subscribe to the Channel itself).

Stonehill is situated on the Garden Route, just outside of Mossel Bay (take the Little Brak/ Fraaiutsig/ Reebok turnoff from the N2, travel 500 metres inland, and it’s on your left. You can’t miss it), and if you thought we Outeniqualanders couldn’t could cook up fine cuisine - you’re very wrong.

Executive Chef Tim Casten made a meal of fresh oysters - which he’d harvested himself (“We got all the right permits and licenses first,” said Allan) - followed by mussels marinier, and then a fillet of fish (which Tim also caught himself; he’s a spear fisherman, too) served with a fondant potato thingy, and - you’d never believe it - salt and vinegar ice cream (which Chef Pablo pronounced superb). And for desert, a rose petal ice cream with lavender jelly served with fruit caviar made individual bubble by individual bubble in a slow, deliberate process using guava and orange purees, and a cold mixture of - I think- sodium algernate, calcium chloride, and water.

Now how creative and interesting was that?

And the filming was enormously interesting, too - both from the point of view of watching a couple of great chefs at work, and because the crew are all Argentines, and it was good to meet and spend time with people from another country (and, too, because I’ve never met an Argentine I could dislike…).

And this is why I say we’re so privileged to be working in this all-absorbing industry of ours.

But I have to ask (you know me by now, there’s always something I have to ask) - how many of us have forgotten why we booked our seats in tourism in the first place?

What got me thinking along these lines was the point that Allan Robertson made that when tourists come to Mossel Bay, they tend to look for the chain restaurants, the franchises, and often overlook the local spots, and the small, lovingly tended places like Stonehill.

I think, though, that Allan might be looking at things from the demand side rather than from the supply side, and that the problem lies with us (the industry) rather than our guests - since, because so much of today’s tourism product belongs to the corporates, the buying public probably isn’t even aware that many of these little businesses even exist.

And I would argue that this is because we as an industry have lost too  many of our passionate, committed people - people like Allan, Tim, and their General Manager, Leon Coetzee, who tends the organic garden at Stonehill, and farms its earthworms. (Yes, its earthworms - they serve them warm, live, and wriggly … to the veggies, of course.)

So tell me - is there still room for great characters in tourism? Is there still room for individuals, for gifted amateurs even, for those eccentrics who’ve always put everything they have into making people feel welcome, rather than for bean counters who put everything aside in the pursuit of dividends?

And how would it change the tourism industry (even down to the level of its carbon footprint) if the pendulum began to swing back in that direction?

It would be very interesting to know…

(Visit Stonehill Restaurant at www.stonehill.co.za. Chef Pablo Massey and the elGourmet crew - producers Laura Krohn and Maria Hurtado, director Julio Hormaeche, and cameraman Gustavo Gómez Olivera - were transported by tour guide Matthew Pinker of Cape Town-based BengaAfrica, and stayed at The Point Hotel in Mossel Bay).

Now go away on holiday - it’s in the economy’s best interests.