Around the World in 80 Rounds: Chasing a Golf Ball from Tierra del Fuego to the Land of the Midnight Sun - Hardcover

Wood, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312375778 ISBN 13: 9780312375775

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2008

Synopsis

“Jealous. That’s what I am. Green with golf envy…Why didn’t we think of that? I mean, what golfer worth his, or her, balls wouldn’t want to trade all the troubles of life for the adventure and privilege of teeing it up everywhere from the glacial volcanoes of the Andes to the Arctic Circle in Norway?”--from the foreword by Turk Pipkin

At 47, David Wood sold everything he owned and set out to fulfill every golfer’s dream: For one year, he traveled the world (covering 60,000 miles and every continent except Antartica) by plane, boat, train, motorcycle and rickshaw, to play the game he loves in the most exotic locales, including the world’s highest, driest, hottest, coldest, and most remote golf courses, and lived to tell the tale.

Along the way, he met a bevy of fascinating characters, including surly cabbies, taxi drivers with a death wish, welcoming golf course managers, threatening kangaroos, and golf pros out for a quick game. David faced dire situations, such as bouts of food poisoning in India and Egypt, altitude sickness in Argentina, getting booted out of the Ukraine by armed guards, and muddling through with limited language skills, but through it all he maintained a sense of humor and of course his passion for golf, which he played every chance he got.

About this title

About the Author

David Wood is a former stand-up comedian with a life-long passion for golf. He currently writes a monthly humor column for Grand Tour magazine as well as golf articles for periodicals and Web sites. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Visit his Web site at www.DavidWoodSpeaking.com

 

Reviews

Former standup comedian and humor columnist Wood sold his condo in Seattle and set out on a yearlong global golfing journey. He tells a highly entertaining tale of his trip through 22 countries far off the beaten path from the typical golf vacation. He played the first of his 80 rounds on the world's southernmost course at the tip of Argentina and finished in the northernmost climes of the upper reaches of Norway. In between he played a vast range of layouts: a grassless brown track in the Atacama Desert of Chile; spectacular courses in New Zealand and Australia; a course adjacent to the pyramids and sphinx in Egypt; and the only golf course in all of Russia. He suffered various setbacks, such as golf clubs temporarily lost on a South American bus line. He writes well about the terrain and local atmosphere, and provides a deft mix of golf and travel writing. His take on the people of the world is a 48-year-old bachelor's perspective, as he judges Argentina, Chile and Hungary to have the best-looking women and writes longingly of a beautiful foot masseuse in China. Wood's humor is sometimes forced, but like a few shanked shots in an otherwise well-played round of golf, it doesn't spoil the whole. (Mar.)
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Chapter 1

Four centuries plus after Mary’s last game, my bus bounced along the rocky dirt road that parallels Magellan’s discovered channel as I was on my way to Ushuaia, Argentina, the home of the world’s southernmost golf course. Ushuaia was the first goal of my around-the-world golfing quest.

It had been a long slog of travel from Seattle to get to within spitting distance from Ushuaia. Zigzagging across both Americas, I had flown ten thousand air miles south from the Pacific Northwest to Santiago, which sits midway down the shaft of the one-iron–shaped Chile.

I had spent five days in Santiago acclimating myself to South America and enjoying the robust, but terribly smoggy, capital city. I met with travel agents trying to find the best methods to get around overland. The common consensus was the overnight sleeper bus—the salon de cama. I had hoped to take trains, my favorite mode of transportation, but rail travel is sadly on a severe decline in those parts. While sipping Chilean coffee in Santiago’s charming sidewalk bistros, I came up with an outline of an itinerary for the South American portion of my quest.

My plan of attack to explore golf in South America was to make my way to Ushuaia first and play the world’s most southern course (once the snow cleared). Next was a trip to golf-rich Buenos Aires with a side excursion to Uruguay. While doing my hasty research in Seattle, I had read that there was a terrific course in Montevideo designed by the Michelangelo of golf-course architecture, Dr. Alister MacKenzie. Along with numerous golf-course masterpieces built in the 1920s and 1930s, MacKenzie has golf’s greatest design on his vaulted résumé—Cypress Point on California’s splendid Monterey Peninsula. An Alister MacKenzie–designed course in Uruguay? If true, it would be like finding an unknown Picasso hanging next to the velvet Elvis on the wall of a double-wide in an Arkansas trailer park. This I wanted to see. Finally, my plans were: back to Chile for the northern half of the one-iron and then top it off with a journey to Bolivia’s La Paz and a visit to their nosebleed-high course. It was a rough outline and that’s all I wanted—just me, my golf clubs, my Dramamine, and my map.

My only other obligation was the promise I had made to my sister that I would find out whether or not the water swirls the other way around in the toilet when flushed in the Southern Hemisphere. She was under the belief that it flows in the opposite direction below the equator. Living in Minnesota, and the mother of my two beautiful teenage nieces, she probably wanted something clever to impress her friends and loved ones on those bitter-cold Minnesota nights in January.

While in Santiago, I had also attempted to use the small bits of Spanish I had hurriedly crammed into my head. Back in Seattle, I bought a self-learning cassette-tape course of elementary Spanish and tried to give myself a crash course in Español. Up until then, the most complex phrase I knew was tacos al carbon. Having decided to take this trip only two months prior, there obviously wasn’t the time to learn Spanish as thoroughly as I would have liked. Especially since Santiago seems to be the wild-dog center of the universe with packs of ferocious canines trotting around in roving gangs most every block, the phrase that would really could have come in handy was:¿ Perdóname, cuándo fue la última vez que ese gruñiendo, destraillido Doberman tuyo mató y comió un viajero norteamericano? (“Excuse me, when was the last time that growling, unleashed Doberman of yours killed and ate a North American traveler?”)

Traveling south from Santiago my next destination was Valdivia. I went to the main bus depot to find my salon de cama. When a South American takes a bus trip, every member of his or her family comes to see them off. Grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, and third cousins twice removed all come along for moral support. I saw this ritual repeated over and over again in the continent’s bus terminals. On the platform next to me stood a thirtysomething gentleman from Santiago who was waiting for the same bus as I was. He was accompanied by eleven relatives to see him off. Thinking perhaps he was moving away from home and wouldn’t be seeing his loved ones for a long time, I asked him if he was leaving Santiago for an extended time. “No, I’m going to Valdivia on business. I take this trip twice a month. I’ll be back in two days.” I was going around the world for a year and no relatives back in the U.S. saw it necessary to go see me off.

The overnight ride to Valdivia cost me twenty-nine dollars and served two purposes—it got me hundreds of miles closer to Ushuaia and was a cheap place to bunk. Our double-decker bus arrived, and I began the Chilean leg of my quest for Ushuaia.

From Santiago, it was ten hours overnight to the delightful river city of Valdivia—where I stayed for a couple of days as Chile was celebrating its independence day. Their holiday is similar to our Fourth of July except they don’t get drunk and blow their fingers off with fireworks like we do. They get drunk and blow off their entire limbs. What people in Chile consider fireworks, we consider major artillery fire. There were explosions throughout the night that shook my hotel room. I wondered if a war had broken out instead of a celebration.

Moving on from Valdivia, I took a four-hour ride to the dour Chilean port city of Puerto Montt. From there, I immediately boarded another flight and flew three hours due south to another of Chile’s outposts—Punta Arenas, which unhappily boasts of having the world’s largest hole in the ozone hovering over its exposed head. From there, I boarded another passenger bus to travel fifteen hours overland across the archipelagos of southern Chile and Argentina to Patagonia and then down into Tierra del Fuego and Ushuaia sitting on the basement floor of the continent.

Entering Tierra del Fuego, I could feel the edge of the golfing world was near. The pale blue horizon looked more atmospheric than sky, as if the blue molecules were sparse and a well-struck golf shot could pierce the fragile veil and soar directly into deep space. The middle of the earth seemed to hog all the oxygen and only threw us the scraps as the latitudes became smaller in circumference. If you set a globe of the earth on the ground like a golf ball, Ushuaia would be smack-dab on the grass alongside frigid Antarctica. These were areas where people visited to watch penguins frolic, not to play golf.

I had spent the previous night in a tiny hotel room in Punta Arenas—a city of 121,000. Scottish and British immigrants flocked there in the later 1800s to seek their fortunes in the wool and gold booms of the time. With the harsh winds and barren landscape, the Scots would have felt right at home.

Punta Arenas sits on the Strait of Magellan, and was a perfect locale as a trading city for the Southern Hemisphere. Before the Panama Canal, it was also a crucial refueling station for ships circling South America. Great fortunes were made in the boom, and opulent mansions built at the turn of the twentieth century stand as testament to that wealth today. Most of these homes have lost their luster, but were indeed grander than one would expect given their location on the earth.

I had phoned ahead from Puerto Montt to book this hotel on the advice of my guidebook. Calling my room small wouldn’t have been doing it justice. Actually, calling the accommodation a “hotel room” was a bit of a stretch: it was a broom closet with a bed. Being claustrophobic, I went down to the front desk to see if a larger room could be found. I had no desire to sleep in a coffin until I no longer had any say in the matter. “No, Senor Wood, you’re in our deluxe room,” the innkeeper insisted.

Accepting my fate, I went back to my casket-sized room. I had to slow dance with my golf travel bag to get back into the teeny space. I could lie in bed, stretch out both arms and touch the opposing walls. The bathroom sink was so close I didn’t even have to get out of bed to brush my teeth before nodding off.

Waking up surprisingly rested and ready for the final leg to Ushuaia, I woke early with the excitement that this was the day I would venture to the very end of South America. The weather was brisk as snow was in the forecast. Wisely, I put on my silk long underwear just in case the bus was cold.

My hotel was only one block from the bus depot. I showed up bright and early, clean, packed, warm, and fully prepared for the day of travel. Then all hell broke loose. I discovered they didn’t take credit cards for the bus ticket. I had no Chilean pesos left. I had tried to play it smart financially by spending all my Chilean pesos as I would be in Argentina the following evening. My guidebook had warned that changing money between the two countries was a risk as one rarely accepts the currency of the other. Thinking I was being a clever traveler, I spent every last cent of my Chilean pesos the night before on a wonderful seafood dinner and bought provisions for the long day of bus travel set to begin at seven the next morning. Clever traveler, I wasn’t.

People in Chile were among the nicest, kindest, most helpful people I was to meet in my travels, but the “gentleman” at the bus counter wasn’t one of them. We weren’t communicating well, and he was one of the few people who didn’t take kindly to my terrible Spanish. I think the only English words he knew were: “No Visa!”

The bus was leaving in twenty minutes. I sprinted down the streets of Punta Arenas looking for a cash machine at seven in th...

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312375778
• ISBN 13: 9780312375775
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304