Happy New Year to everyone, I hope you all had a good Christmas and that 2017 is an exciting prospect for you.
Brocton member Pete Holford sent me an email:
'Just thinking about you all back home, just won the Chiang Rai Open 36 holes with 40pts at Waterford valley and nett 71 at Happy City.
As you can see its cold and wet here!'
I was fortunate enough to spend it in Brisbane and it was super weird to wish folks back home a happy new year at midnight Australia time, then go to bed, get up in the morning, play 9 holes of golf and get back in the pool for an hour before watching the fireworks on TV and see your New Year messages live at that time.
It looked on social media like the NYE party at the golf club was in full swing and I saw that we've had some pretty ferocious winds and frosts and fog back home but fortunately no snow.
I'm writing this on the plane home and if anyone goes to the land of XXXX beer, cockatoos and super friendly folk, I'd definitely recommend using Singapore Airlines. I had a chip in a glass on one flight and they were devastated, the chief steward came to apologise in person and gave me a voucher for $75! As standard practice, we were all given $40 each to spend on anything in Changi airport and we spent the transfer time in a rooftop swimming pool on the way home overlooking the runway. If you have a stop-over of 6 hours or more they'll even give you a free guided tour of Singapore City!
This would be my summary of Oz:
- Absolutely everything that lives is trying to bite you.
- Australia has 9 of the most 10 venomous snakes in the world but as the locals put it 'luckily only one of them will actually give chase'
- which is nice to know. - Australians complain about the heat like Brits complain about the rain.
- Koala's, snakes, kangaroos and the duck-billed platypus are all mythical creatures designed to get you to Oz in the aid of tourism
- everywhere we were met with cries of you'll definitely see x here turned out to be false alarms. (Actually that's not quite true, the kids saw a Cobra on the road and Simon and I went out in the bush in the dark to find a Kangaroo at all costs and almost came face to face with one standing tall and staring at us as soon as we turned on our phone torches on in the pitch black!)
- Sharks are a much underestimated threat:
- When going surfing we were recommended where to go based on which beach was less 'sharky' than others. The theory being that 'No worries - if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen' to which I would reply 'not if you surf where there aren't any sharks it won't.'
- We had a few days North of Brisbane and were told by the locals that 'you won't get sharks there'. When I enquired why a helicopter kept flying up and down the coast the response was 'Oh that's just looking for sharks"??
- after diving off the back of a boat and snorkelling off an island at the Great Barrier Reef in supposedly safe waters, we then took a trip onto the island and saw 15 black tipped reef sharks swimming in a small offshore pool which had been created by the low tide, our guide assured us they were fine as the high tide would set them free from the coral to which Lewis summed up 'what's to stop them swimming to where we were snorkelling then?!'
- Ultimately you get surprisingly blasé about sharks, we based it on the theory that if you're not the only one in the sea and you're not the furthest out, then things are good as you're not the only thing on the menu and not the easiest to nibble on.
In summary, let's all stick to golf in the UK as I don't recall ever having to concern myself with things trying to bite, sting or chomp the life out of me on the course (unless you cut in front of someone on the back nine of course!)
