What do golfers do when their regular golf courses get too boring and they've got far too much money? They head for southern Africa for a luxury golf safari, of course. Pricey tours head through Pretoria, Swaziland, Durban and Sun City, giving golf addicts the chance to enjoy 18 holes at five different courses.
On the off days (or when you think your handicap's just getting too high), you can go on game drives and see some of those African animals everyone always raves about.
Power Golf are the fellows behind these luxury golf and safari combinations, and they do provide a non-golfing activity every day of the tour for unfortunate tagalongs and uninterested golf wives. They claim to travel on the most luxurious train in the world, but perhaps the brand-spankin' new Trans-Siberian will be disputing that soon.
When we were your age, we had to walk two miles and bike up a hill to get travel insurance. Even then, we were only covered for things like getting our leg bitten off by a wolverine. The kids are crazy these days, though, and things are changing in the insurance industry.
Cancel-for-any-cause policies are becoming more popular. These plans typically allow you to get more of your money back and with shorter advance notice, depending on the company. That means that you need not have a wolverine dilemma to cancel--perhaps you just got in a fight with your travel buddy and no longer want to spend a week cooped up together. Then again, with a sample $2000 trip for two, you could end up parting with as much as $563 if disaster strikes.
The best new policy, however, has got to be Travel Guard's Tee, Tour & Travel package. Yeah yeah, it'll cover you if your game gets rained out, but it'll also buy you $250 worth of drinks if you hit a hole in one. Now, if that covers mini-golf, we are so sold it ain't even funny.
Can we possibly give you any more reasons to travel to Egypt? Okay, the odd attack on tourists and the necessity of traveling around in police-surrounded cavalcades could put you off a bit, but if you look past the security hassles, Egypt seems to really have everything. Including, somewhat surprisingly for a big desert, golf courses.
The Fly Golf company--specializing in golf tours of Egypt, something we would have considered a real niche market--markets itself with the touching slogan "Take off, tee off, we care." And their website visually confirms the unexpected: they really do have greens in Egypt. Five golf courses surround Cairo, more can be found near Luxor, and they're starting to spring up along the Red Sea. So when you're planning your next golfing holiday, think desert, sea and golf greens--they care.
Augusta National @ 33.506, -82.018 on Google Earth
Golf purists say that even with the highest definition television set on the market you can't capture the awe inspiring beauty of Augusta National. We say--whatever golf hacks, we will stare at it from above, like we do everything else, and enjoy it.
Now you can recreate Tiger's muffed puts and Phil Mickelson's crisp iron shots, on Internet delay, via satellite still shots, using little white photoshop pixels as golf balls. Or just sit around and wait for Google's first web broadcast of the Masters. It might happen someday.
We have no idea where "Amen Corner" is in this shot, but we are sure some enterprising reader can find it. What we do know is CBS has been known to pipe in bird chirps to their golf telecasts--can you believe it?
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by amandak
