While walking through a book store recently, I saw a book with bright red letters on the cover that looked like a postcard. The title said I Golfed Across Mongolia, and I was very intrigued by the book. Written by Andre Tolme, the book is 262 pages long and easy to read. It is divided into eighteen chapters with fairly long words and well-spaced lines on each page.
Andre Tolme was a typical, well-paid civil engineer living in New Hampshire with a keen interest in golf, which he tried to do every weekend. He also had a keen interest in travel, having visited more than fifty countries in his lifetime. After traveling to Mongolia and seeing how the landscape invited golf, he decided to do something crazy; he would quit his job for a year and try to play golf throughout the country of Mongolia.
Most golf fans wish they could play golf every day, but work and family usually don’t allow us to play as often. Tolme felt the same way and asked his boss for a leave of absence so he could go on his golf expedition. His boss kindly allowed him to take a break from work and return to work when the expedition was over if he so wished. Tolme went shopping where he bought essentials such as hiking shoes, approximately 500 golf balls, a sturdy tent and a GPS system, and set off for Mongolia.
Overall, the expedition would take about three months by Tolme’s calculations and cover more than 1,200 miles. He calculated that he could hit 120 to 140 shots every day with just a 3-iron and walk 12 miles and reach his goal in 90 days. After a slow start, he began to meet his daily quota, sometimes even exceeding his expected number of shots and miles.
However, after a few days, he began to experience serious problems. The main problem was the huge blisters on his feet. As you can imagine, walking 1,200 miles will have a negative effect on his feet. Tolme’s blisters were so bad that he was forced to open them himself and put salt in them as instructed by his friend. His sore feet were a problem throughout the trip, but he dealt with the pain and kept going. In addition, he found that lifting his 40- to 60-pound package 140 times a day was extremely tiring. His back began to ache so badly that he began to think of other ways he could carry his backpack from one shot to another without lifting it himself.
Tolme’s solution came in the form of a cart. He had considered horses, camels, vehicles and other people, but his best solution was a small cart. Between shots, he simply placed his club on the cart and pushed it about 200 yards to where the ball stopped rolling. However, he almost immediately discovered that pushing the cart was even worse than continually lifting his heavy bag. The cart got caught in clumps of grass and was positioned at an odd angle, making going up and down hills uncomfortable. Therefore, he gave the car to a stranger in a different city and began to depend on humans.
Andre Tolme hired two caddies on his travels in Mongolia. He found local men through people he knew who were happy to use his jeeps to take him several hundred miles at a time. A man named Khatanbaatar was especially helpful. This local Mongolian man gave Andre advice on which direction he should hit his golf ball, served as a communicator for other Mongolians, helped him find food and water, and sheltered him when windstorms came and locals looked questionable. Tolme’s journey through Mongolia would have been nearly impossible were it not for the help of men like Khatanbaatar.
Tolme finally meets his goal after 12,170 shots in a city called Khovd. When a man he met on his travels asked him how he was feeling and found him in Khovd, Tolme told him that he was simply “tired”. The trip has taken a lot of physical and mental toll on Tolme and he was very glad he did it. When asked why he even embarked on the journey in the first place, he said, “To raise awareness.” This is a very vague answer, but Tolme intended it that way. After completing his journey through Mongolia, he realized that he did not need a solid reason to start the journey. He knew that people now know where Mongolia is because of the publicity he provided, how decent people are from him, and that you can really learn a lot about the world and yourself by completely changing the pace of life.
Although this book is simple and silly at times, it is a very entertaining story about a country and a people that many of us do not understand. Mongolia is a country that has basic people who will offer you food and water even if they themselves don’t have much. The land is bare with periodic rivers and deserts and largely uninhabited. Tolme constantly tells his readers how a random Mongol would approach him or invite him to his tent and give him his best cuts of meat and water. The hospitality he received is refreshing and the perspective he received on humanity and how to walk away from life from time to time is what I will remember most from reading I Golfed Across Mongolia. I rate this book a 3.5 out of 5.