TRAVEL ... with DAVID BRAY
Now here’s a rare thing. Unique in fact. As a life-long golfer and fairly frequent traveller, your reporter has never set eyes on a golf course he didn’t want to play. Not until a few weeks ago.
Coober Pedy has such a course, surprising in the fact that it’s there at all, totally lacking in appeal. Mainly because its surface boasts not one blade of grass. Sandy soil and stones, 18 holes, 5706 metres, par 72. We are told it is mostly played at night “with glowing balls” (a topic I pursued no further in our tour group bus). Players carry a little square of plastic material around to hit off.
They are welcome. But get this: Coober Pedy is the only club in the world to enjoy reciprocal rights at The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. Checked this one out and the story – from the Aussie Golfer blog – is that the Coober Pedy clubhouse burned down in 2002.
After the replacement was built, the club president sent St.Andrew's a photograph of the course and told them it was about time they got their course in good shape and asked if they would like reciprocal membership.
Surprisingly, a letter arrived from St.Andrew's Links Trust granting reciprocal rights on the provision they grant St.Andrew’s an opal mine. The opal mine and reciprocal rights were given and Cooper Pedy became the only course in the world with reciprocal rights with St.Andrew’s. One small catch: The reciprocal rights granted to Coober Pedy members is for the Balgove Course, the nine-hole and perhaps worst course in the St.Andrew’s Links Trust portfolio. Still a good story.
We find ourselves in Coober Pedy as part of a busy two-day, one- night expedition. That’s how long it takes us to get back of Bourke, underground at Coober Pedy, flying low over Lake Eyre and higher over the channel country into Birdsville.
In fact from front door to back home again is 37-and-a-half hours and I reckon we see more of this astonishing country on this trip than ever before. We are with a group of 60 souls, almost all of us well into the mature years.
Here’s the way it goes:
6 am: Taxi to airport. Head for Alliance check-in counter 11, where there’s no doubt about the demographics of the group – couples, 65-plus, most of us used to a bit of travel. Our transport is an Alliance Fokker 50, high wing, 60 passengers, two each side of the aisle. View is much the same from each, so no real need to swap when the views appear after 90 minutes of cloud.
Two hours to Bourke for fuel, 20 minutes to stretch the legs. Fine clear sunny day. Another two hours plus to Coober Pedy. One of the least appealing townscapes ever. Bare, barren a million holes and heaps.
Lunch underground, then off on a three-hour town tour including a couple of interesting churches (underground), the golf course and a nicely informative film about opals, followed by an opal-cutting demonstration.
Check in to the Desert Cave motel. Dugout room, by request, listed as four-star and pretty close to it. Comfortable, clean and as we find later in the night, very very dark and very very quiet.
Good company in the underground bar and at dinner where the food is adequate and wines good.
SES is running an exercise at the airport, but we get away on time and are quite soon at Lake Eyre where the pilots take us down to 1000 feet and we see just what an enormous expanse of water lies here still.
Onwards and upwards, Goyder Lagoon over fascinating patterns views of the Channel country, it looks almost water-logged and down to Birdsville, sunny, cool and home to an extraordinary museum of Queensland country life.
Reasonable lunch at the pub. Where else? And a three-hour plus flight home, with a glass or so of wine see us through. Down on time and the baggage carousel turns out to be right at the escalator to AirTran terminal.
Eight minutes to the next one. Change at Central, 12 minutes wait.
Home at Toowong by 7.30.
This is an excellent way to see remote and important parts of our country most of us would not otherwise venture into. It sounds hurried but wasn’t really so, even for those of us well into our 70s.
• Australian Air Holidays Weekend in the Outback. $2195 per person.
