ROAD TO 100 - GOING OUTTABOUNDS DOWN UNDER
By the end of 2024 me and my friend Carlos had decided to leave Europe in search of a golf adventure outta bounds.
We needed a challenge so we dared ourselves to play a hundred different courses… but we didn't quite get there but somewhere along the way the tally stopped being the point as they only tell part of the story.
We played Australia's number one golf course, and the longest golf course in the world. We played a grass course carved improbably into the desert, and sand-green courses strung along the coast. We played one private club, and a great many more that were run entirely by volunteers. We found 1,378 golf balls at Kalgoorlie and lost almost as many again on King Island. We shared a round with a former European Tour player, another with a former Team Australia player, and crossed paths with an Australian golf icon along the way. Carlos caddied at the Australian Open, I was there to watch.
Between rounds, we bought three cars and drove more than 30,000 kilometers along beaches, down empty straight roads, and through stretches of bush that never seemed to end. We pitched two thirteen-dollar tents for more than a hundred nights, some of which without water or electricity, while for more than sixty, one campground was simply home.
What follows is the story behind those numbers.
I. Before Australia - A Promise Made at Royal Troon
Just before Perth appeared on a departure board, this golfing journey had already begun in an unexpected place. The summer before we left Europe, I spent a day at the 152nd Open Championship at Royal Troon, working on behalf of one of the tournament's official sponsors. It was only a single day, yet it introduced me to Donald, who was one of the brand’s biggest buyers. Between conversations overlooking one of golf's oldest championships, I mentioned that Carlos and I were about to begin a year in Australia. Donald smiled and challenged me to make one small detour first: “Stop in Singapore. I will show you home.” We took him up on it.
Before Australia, there was Singapore and a brief crossing into Malaysia, where Donald welcomed us as though we were lifelong friends. We managed to squeeze in thirty-six holes in a single day before boarding our flight to Perth. Looking back now, it feels fitting that the journey began not with Australia itself, but with an act of generosity from someone who had been a stranger I had only met for one day.
- 07/01/2025 Forest City Golf
- 07/01/2025 Horizon Hills
II. The Stranger Who Started It All
Before the long drives, before the remote courses, before we had even really registered that we were in Australia, there was Grant. It was our first time using Couchsurfing to be hosted by someone, and it meant two strangers from Portugal landing in Western Australia and choosing to trust a person neither of us had ever met.
Grant picked us up from the airport, and within minutes it felt as though we had known him for years. He works as a golf course general manager in Mandurah, though that title barely captures what he gave us. He didn't simply offer a roof over our heads, he opened a door into an entirely different way of living. Mornings were spent chasing crabs along the coast, afternoons on the golf course, four rounds in total, all thanks to him. His home sat within a retiree community by the ocean, where every evening followed the same unhurried ritual: neighbours gathering on a small private beach, a cold beer in hand, watching the sun drop into the Indian Ocean. It was hard not to wonder whether this was simply how Australians lived.
Before we left Mandurah, the story circled back on itself in a way neither of us expected. A decade earlier, on our home course in Portugal, Carlos had caddied for Daniel Fox at the Portuguese Open. Now, on the opposite side of the world, Foxy turned up again, this time helping us buy our first car, a three-thousand-dollar Toyota RAV4 with a broken CV joint. We named her Ronda — short for Ronda the Rav4 Rocket. We'd asked Grant about iconic Aussie names, and he told us about a member at Mandurah, a lady named Ronda who played so fast her nickname had become Ronda the Rocket. It felt right. She was about to take us across an entire continent.
- 10/01/2025 Mandurah
- 12/01/2025 The Cut
- 14/01/2025 Meadow Springs
- 15/01/2025 Kwinana Golf Club
III. Ronda Hits the Road
I had done this run before. Not with these two, but with someone else, years earlier, an owner who liked the coast road better than the highway and used me for it constantly, back and forth between Esperance and Perth, so many times the route was less a memory than a habit worn into my bones. So, when they loaded me up with three hundred dollars of camping gear, two tents, a stove, a mattress, a couple of chairs, and an electric cooler borrowed from one of Grant's neighbors and pointed me south with no real plan beyond "away," I knew the road. I didn't know what they were going to do with it. Almost eleven hundred kilometers of it, as it turned out, one way.
Margaret River first, and instead of following the coast the way I expected, they turned me straight toward a golf course before either of them had given a single thought to where they'd sleep. That part was new to me. I'd carried camping gear before, on this same road, but never clubs. I have always been something of an optimist, inclined to believe that things generally work themselves out. Such a theory was tested almost immediately. We arrived late at Gracetown Caravan Park to find a sign on the door reading fully booked. While they stood there weighing our options, the owner wandered over for a chat, and within a few minutes had offered us a patch of grass in his backyard. Thanks to Gaz, that became the first of what would turn out to be dozens of nights spent sleeping under Australian skies. I hoped they had learned the lesson: book the campsite first; play golf after.
East after that, through Denmark, the Australian one, and this part I remembered. I had been down this stretch enough times to know Elephant Cove was coming before they did, boulders sitting half-submerged like something enormous asleep in the shallows, and Greens Pool beside it, glass-still and turquoise even under cloud. They came back from the water sandy and quiet, the way people get after seeing something they weren't quite prepared for. I had been amazed by it before. It still looked like that.
Albany came next, and with it something else I had no memory of. The Albany Country Club, a true links course strung along the edge of the Great Australian Bight, wind off the water the whole round. I know this coastline. I did not know about this course. Whoever drove me here before must have had better sense than to bring clubs. Then the long haul to Esperance, the part of the trip that felt most like mine. I know that road properly. The salt lakes start appearing well before the town does, flat white ghosts of water either side of the highway, exactly as I remember them. But the golf course that ran straight through them was new to me too, fairways bending around dry lake beds instead of trees or bunkers, nothing like it anywhere else on the trip.
Past the town, Lucky Bay, a place I will never get tired of returning to. Water so clear it barely looked real, sand so white it looked cold even in the sun and a very tranquil peace in the air. We went back before dawn the second time, driving slowly to avoid any kangaroos, and I sat parked in the dark while they climbed Frenchman Peak to watch the sun come up over Cape Le Grand. When they came back down, breakfast was cooked on the sand with nothing else on the schedule. I knew this beach already. Watching them find it for the first time was its own kind of good.
- 24/01/2025 Margaret River Golf Club
- 26/01/2025 Denmark Golf Club
- 27/01/2025 Albany Golf Club
- 29/01/2025 Esperance Golf Club
Next: 6 months in the Western Australia Desert. Kalgoorlie. A Trip North. Goldfields Classic
