The whole experience was simply one of the very best I have ever had in the world. However, it was without doubt, worth the effort. I wasn't expecting it to be as hard, or as expensive, to plan my trip to Australia. What a terrible shame that people travelling the globe to experience these fine courses cannot do so on one glorious day.Ĭlearly I found some aspects of organising my trip quite frustrating. They have 2 of the most amazing courses in the country and when I asked if there was a way to play 36 holes in one day I was met with a flat out 'no'. Maybe my biggest gripe is for Royal Melbourne. So, the weekend is the perfect time to head to Tasmania and King Island where you can play whenever you want.
Weekend play without a member is pretty much impossible. In Melbourne, most private courses have only a couple of hours available for visitors, around the middle of the day, two or three times a week.
Most of the private courses have very defined times for guests and there is little obvious flexibility. If you don’t need one for St Andrews or Muirfield…īrace, brace - this is complicated. I don't want to sound churlish, but it is quite a palaver and frankly means everything takes much longer to organise than it should. Click on the links below for details.įor the private courses, a letter of introduction from your current club is sometimes required (although you don’t need to be a master forger to produce such a document!). A few weeks before we went, the temperature was in the high 30s centigrade and some courses were closed because it was so hot! In March, the chance of extreme heat reduces, and it is after the fly season which I am told are best avoided.īarnbougle is nice and easy - online booking. The summer in Melbourne can be quite something. I did quite a lot of research into the Melbourne climate and spoke to some locals and the consensus was that the end of summer was probably the best time - we went in early March. If you haven’t discovered Thousand Greens yet, I wrote about it here a few months ago and is well worth investigating. Thousand Greens would be a great way to meet some locals who could take you on and the private Melbourne courses are pretty well represented. However, if you can find a member to get you on the private courses then you could increase the number of those you play. In this itinerary I have put more emphasis on the public courses, as well as the ‘must sees’. Royal Melbourne is the most expensive ‘regular’ visitor tee time of any golf club anywhere in the world! And while the welcome we got everywhere was warm, the private Melbourne clubs didn’t make it easy to get a game! You can basically split the courses into two types - public courses that offer some of the very best value in the world (Barnbougle, St Andrew’s Beach, Cape Wickham and Ocean Dunes) and the private Melbourne clubs that are, at times, breathtakingly expensive.
However, organising a trip isn’t as straightforward as visitors from the UK might be used to. The good news is you can play pretty much every golf course in Australia (only Ellerston is truly private). My blogs about my Australia adventure led to a flurry of emails (OK, at least half a dozen) from readers asking about the logistics and costs of putting together a similar trip.
0 kommentar(er)
