Andre Tolme sized up the day's golfing terrain -- thousands of yards of treeless steppe rolling toward a distant horizon. Without another golfer to be seen anywhere on the horizon, he loosened up at his own pace, taking practice swings with a 3-iron.
Then, with a powerful whirl and a satisfying swak, he sent the little white ball soaring far into the clear blue Mongolian sky.
"I feel good about that shot," Tolme said, intently tracking the ball until it disappeared from view. "You could just hit the ball forever here."
PHOTO: NY TIMES
In a sense, he is. This summer, Tolme, a civil engineer from New Hampshire, is golfing across Mongolia. Treating this enormous Central Asian nation as his private course, he has divided Mongolia into 18 holes. The total fairway distance is 2,322,000 yards. Par is 11,880 strokes.
"You hit the ball," he said, explaining his technique in a land without fences, a nation that is twice the size of Texas. "Then you go and find it. Then you hit it again. And again. And again."
Moving across the rolling steppe, Tolme is walking a route favored almost a millennium ago by Genghis Khan. The fairway may be something less than manicured, but to the north are Siberian forests and to the south is the Gobi Desert, one of the world's largest sand traps.
With his caddy, Khatanbaatar, carrying water, food and a tent in a Russian jeep customized with an upholstery of handwoven rugs, Tolme teed off May 28 and calculates he will finish his game in the trading center of Khovd sometime around the end of July.
That a lone American, armed only with a 3-iron and an easy, impish smile, can golf across Mongolia reflects several factors: the friendliness of largely Buddhist Mongolia to Americans; Mongolia's geography of vast unfenced expanses; and a new extreme golf movement that is prompting young Americans and Europeans to break way out of country clubs.
For Tolme, 35, it is also a summer adventure: a night listening to a chorus of howling wolves; standing dumbstruck as children race horses down the steppe toward him; enjoying the hospitality of the nomads, drinking fermented mare's milk inside a yurt; and watching as sheets of rain and lightning bolts march down the open plain.
"Hey, I watched the movie Caddyshack, I know to keep my club down when there is lightning around," he said. A few minutes later an early summer hail storm struck, driving him into his jeep.
To Khatanbaatar, Tolme's golfing style is a bit of a mystery. "I don't know anything about golf, but what I saw on TV, they put the little ball in a little hole," said Khatanbaatar, a retired soldier who still wears camouflage military fatigues.
Tolme, who learned rudimentary Mongolian while golfing across the eastern half of the country last summer, explains that he considers each major town to be a golf hole. Pocketing the ball upon arrival, he walks through the town and then tees up on the other side.
"I only use the tee when I start a hole," Tolme said, adding that he plays by "winter rules because Mongolia can be often cold."
Last summer, Tolme teed off on June 5 in Choybalsan, an old Soviet Army garrison town in Mongolia's far east, facing the Chinese border. Fifty days and 352 lost balls later he surrendered to nettles and high weeds and halted his march in this interior town, his ninth hole, a place described in the Lonely Planet Mongolia guide as of "little interest" with "dreary hotels."
But Arvayheer is about 160km west of Mongolia's geographical center, and Tolme is confident that, about 5,000 strokes from now, he will putt his last ball into Khovd, reaching a Western Mongolian destination popular with tourists for its deep lakes, high mountains and fast rivers.
Guided by a hand-held Global Positioning System device, he expects to golf about 16km a day, skirting mountain ranges and passing sites like crumbling monasteries and a dinosaur bone quarry.
Tolme's only deadline is to beat the late July rains and the subsequent weed explosion. On the steppe, one of his greatest pleasures is meeting people. Alone under the big sky, chatting occasionally with sympathetic sheep, he now places a new value on human relations.
"I am amazed at how easy it is to live very happily with very little, without gadgets and toys," he said as he bounced along a potholed road leading from Ulan Bator, the capital, to here for his second summer tee-off date. "When I meet people living in a yurt, simple homes in the country side, they laugh, they joke, they all know how to have fun."
Tolme's Web site about his adventure -- www.golfmongolia.com -- is filled with amiable encounters with nomads: a pair of teenage boys teaching him how to shear a sheep and how to hobble a horse; free golfing lessons that left a few more rock scratches on his 3-iron; and major drinking sessions that left everyone fast asleep in a cozy yurt.
The human encounters, Tolme said, more than made up for the flies, the blisters, the sunburn and the poisonous snake that once curled around a ball, protecting it as if it were an egg.
"When I say I am American, the universal response is, `Ah, American, very good country, we like Americans,'" he recalled. Part of the response is geopolitical. Treated as a colony of China for hundreds of years, Mongolia won its independence in 1911, only to fall a decade later under the Soviet orbit. Today, the Mongolian government cultivates friends beyond Russia and China. Many Mongolians are followers of Tibetan Buddhism, and suspicion of China is high.
There are signs that Mongolians are awakening to their golf potential. Last year in Ulan Bator, the first golf course opened, complete with horse-mounted caddies who charge after balls, marking their locations with flags on arrows. Last month, the first indoor driving range opened, also in the capital, which was Tolme's sixth hole.
But, some argue, Mongolia could skip the country club phase of golfing, and embark directly on cross golfing, a populist new trend for hitting balls through unorthodox settings like city parks and streets.
With an open, rolling countryside and fairways cut by roughly 30 million grazing animals, Mongolia is ideal for the casual backyard duffer. Here at a roadside yurt camp, a Mongolian man named Bayara looked at one of his five children preparing to take a hack at the ball and predicted, "Within a few years, these kids will probably be holding sticks of their own."
Cheng Ching-hsiang (鄭青祥) turned a small triangle of concrete jammed between two old shops into a cool little bar called 9dimension. In front of the shop, a steampunk-like structure was welded by himself to serve as a booth where he prepares cocktails. “Yancheng used to be just old people,” he says, “but now young people are coming and creating the New Yancheng.” Around the corner, Yu Hsiu-jao (饒毓琇), opened Tiny Cafe. True to its name, it is the size of a cupboard and serves cold-brewed coffee. “Small shops are so special and have personality,” she says, “people come to Yancheng to find such treasures.” She
Late last month Philippines Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro told the Philippine Senate that the nation has sufficient funds to evacuate the nearly 170,000 Filipino residents in Taiwan, 84 percent of whom are migrant workers, in the event of war. Agencies have been exploring evacuation scenarios since early this year, she said. She also observed that since the Philippines has only limited ships, the government is consulting security agencies for alternatives. Filipinos are a distant third in overall migrant worker population. Indonesia has over 248,000 workers, followed by roughly 240,000 Vietnamese. It should be noted that there are another 170,000
Hannah Liao (廖宸萱) recalls the harassment she experienced on dating apps, an experience that left her frightened and disgusted. “I’ve tried some voice-based dating apps,” the 30-year-old says. “Right away, some guys would say things like, ‘Wanna talk dirty?’ or ‘Wanna suck my d**k?’” she says. Liao’s story is not unique. Ministry of Health and Welfare statistics show a more than 50 percent rise in sexual assault cases related to online encounters over the past five years. In 2023 alone, women comprised 7,698 of the 9,413 reported victims. Faced with a dating landscape that can feel more predatory than promising, many in
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu’s (洪秀柱) attendance at the Chinese Communist Party’s (CPP) “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War” parade in Beijing is infuriating, embarrassing and insulting to nearly everyone in Taiwan, and Taiwan’s friends and allies. She is also ripping off bandages and pouring salt into old wounds. In the process she managed to tie both the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) into uncomfortable knots. The KMT continues to honor their heroic fighters, who defended China against the invading Japanese Empire, which inflicted unimaginable horrors on the
RSS