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The Seattle Times: Nation & World: American spends summer golfing across Mongolia
Sunday, July 04, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.
ARVAYHEER, Mongolia — Andre Tolme sized up the day's golfing terrain — thousands of yards of treeless steppe rolling toward a distant horizon. Without a golfer to be seen for 100 miles — the nation's only course is in the capital, Ulan Bator — he loosened up at his own pace, taking practice swings with a 3-iron.
Then, with a powerful whirl and a satisfying swak, he sent the little white ball soaring far into the clear blue Mongolian sky.
"I feel good about that shot," Tolme said, intently tracking the ball until it disappeared from view. "You could just hit the ball forever here."
In a sense, he is. This summer, Tolme, a civil engineer from New Hampshire, is golfing across Mongolia. Treating this enormous Central Asian nation as his private course, he has divided Mongolia into 18 holes. The total fairway distance is 2,322,000 yards. Par is 11,880 strokes.
Moving across the rolling steppe, Tolme is walking a route favored almost a millennium ago by Genghis Khan. The fairway may be something less than manicured, but to the north are Siberian forests and to the south is the Gobi Desert, one of the world's largest sand traps.
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