28.10.13 – what do you get when you combine a jockey club, philanthropy and a government land monopoly?

A public golf course!

No, that’s not a joke because a) If that were the punchline, it simply wouldn’t be funny and so count as a joke and b) Because it’s true.

With Claire’s parents in town, it was time for me at last to try out the Kau Sai Chau public golf course, something I’d been dying to do for ages. Wait, non-golf lovers! This is still pretty interesting, even if you don’t like golf…

When you think ‘public golf course’, i.e. one with no members, in the UK, you imagine a municipal course. I’ve played some good ones at home, but they cannot compete with the higher end members’ clubs, and some can be downright tatty. But that certainly does not apply to Kau Sai Chau.

Here’s how it happened. The Hong Kong Jockey Club is a strange, but rather likeable, beast. It has a monopoly on legal gambling in HK, and as such is the largest single taxpayer in HK; but it is also the largest single philanthropic organisation too. Its speciality is to build or restore buildings or massive infrastructure the government is not inclined to take on…which usually means hospitals, schools, sheltered housing, that sort of thing.

But in the 70s, it was persuaded to right another social imbalance of sorts that doesn’t feel quite so urgent…but I am pleased they did. They pressed the Government to allow them to build a non-members, public golf course, because the very few members clubs could not cater for everyone (and did not want to).

What has that to do with the Government? Well, in HK it technically owns all the land aside from a small patch on which the Anglican cathedral stands. So to build this venture, they had to give up some land.

And so, some leases signed for next to nothing, a gargantuan infrastructure project and billions of HKD later, and the Kau Sai Chau Golf course appeared on an idyllic island just off the picturesque coast of Sai Kung, that is only accessible by special ferry. And boy, what a course – 3 18 hole courses plonked onto rugged and hilly terrain, with views that look so jaw-dropping it’s as if they are a painted backdrop or a picture on Chinese porcelain.

It could only happen quite like that in HK.

It was well worth the two hour slog there by taxi-tube-tube-bus-ferry-bus, and we had a belting time…

For the non-golfers – the course was really good; Trevor played well; I played very inconsistently; we had a nice time. If you don’t care about golf, stop reading now.

For the golfers – we were on what is meant to be the poorer cousin ‘South Course’…but from my mandatory buggy seat, it looked pretty impressive. Every hole seemed to have a great view of the scenery. The tees were placed very imaginatively. The rough was frighteningly unplayable, which added to the fun. Plenty of fiendishly placed bunkers and water traps that seemed to suck your ball in. Incredibly well kept, lightning fast greens. And on form – Trevor shot 36 stapleford points, which as a golfer will know is impressive with borrowed clubs on an unfamiliar course. I shot 33…but in two of the most divergent 9 holes I’ve ever played, with a pitiful 7 points on the front, and an impossible 26 on the back, including 3 birdies. Almost as weird and inexplicable as this most unlikely of course’s itself.