Here, female caddies egg you on

Mark Twain famously described golf as a “good walk spoiled”. But 600,000 annual golfing visitors who throng the 300-odd courses in Thailand will disagree. Standing on top of the par five, fifth tee box with 25 sand bunkers, a water-hole and daunting slopes at the Siam Country Club’s Plantation Course, the last thing I had in mind was a “good walk”.

Pattaya, the first stop in our three-city tour of Thailand, is a veritable mixed bag. While the golf courses and country clubs are divine, the city itself probably ranks as one of the sleaziest on earth. Thanks to indiscriminate construction, there’s not much of a beach left in Pattaya. What’s left is crammed with hundreds of deck chairs. There’s hardly any room on the beach, but out at sea, there’s entertainment in the form of water scooters, speed boats, jet-skiing, and parasailing.

Relatively quiet during the day, the city really comes to life at night. Pattaya was a sleepy fishing and farming town till the Americans, engaged in the war in Vietnam, turned it into a recreation centre in the 1960s and ‘70s. It became the stomping ground for war-weary American GIs in desperate search of mindless sex, excessive booze and hallucination drugs.

Today, neon lights advertising girls and sex flash incessantly all night. Thai girls dressed in schoolgirl uniforms holding up boards promising “two for one cocktails” and “free sex shows” vie for attention. In every sense of the word, Pattaya at night is sleaze.
Golf, though, is another matter.

The 27-hole Siam Country Club and Plantation Course, one of the two courses we tried out in Pattaya, draws no less than 50,000 foreign golfers each year. The 18-hole championship course we played here had 206 sand bunkers, numerous water hazards and daunting roughs, all aimed to test your course management and golfing skills.

But the best courses were reserved for the final leg of our tour. The Black Mountain golf course is owned by a Swedish couple who were taken with the quiet charm of Hua Hin, a holiday resort for moneyed families. Word of this course spread quickly, and soon it was hosting a PGA event.

The Banyan Golf Club is owned by seven Dutch nationals. The clubhouse sits atop a hill, overlooking 18 greens sprawled around the hillside. Treacherous fairway slopes make golfing here a challenge.  The roughs at the Banyan are actually a pineapple plantation and golfers are warned not to venture into the plantation to retrieve lost balls for the pineapple trees’ thorns are tough and dangerous. “Take a penalty drop and get on with the game. Don’t go for any heroics,” the club advises golfers.

But what really makes golfing in Thailand special are the caddies. Like the entire gamut of Thailand’s service industry, even the caddies are women. Most golf courses have smartly-dressed young women caddies who go ga-ga with your best shots. Even when you goof up, their smiles suggest that your shot wasn’t too bad. You eagerly fall for their encouraging smiles until you get to see your wretched scorecard.