Creature discomforts

Caddie's Role/Nedbank Challenge:The speed and frequency with which a golfer can find himself on a different continent week after week at this time of the year means sometimes you can genuinely lose all perspective as to where you are.

It was undeniably Africa when I woke up yesterday and looked out of my bedroom window. Flowering bougainvillea, frangipani, jacarandas and ornate coral trees framed my view of the bushveld that surrounds the Sun City resort. I spotted a monkey squatting among the foliage, and there was the exotic melody of birds singing that is very different to the sound of sunrise in the Northern Hemisphere.

Even though the Gary Player course here is well manicured for the Nedbank Challenge, you do not have to train your eyes too far from the finely clipped fairways to realise that without much attention nature would quickly reclaim this land.

I went for an early morning stroll, only to hear the greens staff had beaten me to the course. There was a distant hum of lawn mowers. As I meandered down one fairway, I was reminded of exactly where in the world I was. A freshly decapitated snake lay wriggling on the freshly cut fifth fairway; civilisation had got the better of this unsuspecting serpent.

A fence surrounds the complex, and it is not there to keep us two-legged creatures in. A leopard was sighted on the course two weeks ago. If you hit an errant tee-shot you come across droppings of all shapes and sizes in the surrounding bush. There are elephant and rhinos beyond the perimeter of the back nine. Troops of baboons wander across the fairways during the tournament. You get the sense we are very much the animals' guests.

The early ramble on a course cut out of the bush got me thinking about what animal you may encounter on a course like this. There is an area to the right of the 15th fairway the local caddies will not go near. It is the natural habitat of cobras, puff adders and black mambas.

A television cameraman thought he had got lucky when he came across a hissing cobra there about five years ago. It would have made great footage for those dead moments on camera if he could get a close-up of a riled snake, he thought. His sound man shook a stick at the snake, and as he brought his camera up to his eye ready to film, the sun reflected off his lens, spooked the cobra and it spat its venom right into the cameraman's eye.

A spectator who happened to know about snakes walked by soon after and explained that the only antidote available at the relatively remote part of the course that would save his eye was urine. There would not be many occasions when you would be happy to let someone urinate in your eye. This cameramen was happy that he did, and his eye was saved.

It would be fair to say the cameraman got what he deserved.

There was an English golfer who came to South Africa about 15 years ago to play the Sunshine Tour. He arrived in southern Africa for the first time in high summer. The tournament was held in a hotspot in the northeast of the country at the Hanse-Merensky Golf Club near Phalaborna, where it gets up to 40 degrees during the day.

The tour had been used to the non-native golfers dragging their heels due to the intense heat, so they had tried to keep on top of slow play. The tour official who was stationed on the seventh hole radioed through to say that no player had been sighted for over half an hour, maybe someone could go back a few holes and try to find out what the problem was.

When he finally tracked back to the third hole he found three distraught players and their caddies. The tardy golfer, who was by now completely dehydrated, had managed to snap hook his tee-shot towards the dam to the left of the hole. Unfortunately for the unsuspecting Englishman, there was a pod of hippopotami living in the same area where his tee-shot came to rest. Worse still, there was a hippo cow with her young who surfaced as the Englishman approached his stray shot.

Hippos are very territorial, and of course mothers are very protective of their young, so the hippo cow chased the entire group to a safe distance from her young. They reckoned they were two kilometres into the bush before she backed off. The rules official took pity on the group and decided not to penalise them for slow play. The Englishman was not deterred by being thrust into the roots of southern Africa and actually settled in the country as a club professional.

I am most definitely in Africa and thankfully, globalisation is not going to dilute that sensation for a long time.