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."
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