Golfing Round the World
Chapter VI One Up
I nearly missed going to Nuwara Eliya (pronounced Newrailya) because it involved rising at an unholy hour of the morning in order to catch the train. Millionaires and extravagant people usually do the hundread and thirty odd miles by car, taking but one third of the time at a very reasonable cost. They must miss however, the interesting experience of a leisurely trip through the interior of Ceylon, in a very comfortable reasonably cool train. They also forgo an opportunity which the long deliberate uphill climb gives the traveller of observing the manners and customs of the Sinhalese, who struck me as being a remarkably happy and healthy race.
They are clear skinned and of an agreeable copper hue and many of them excel in popular sports. A cricket eleven, recruited largely from native talent, lately drew their match with the Australian team then on its way to capture the Ashes from England.
Few places in the world quite rise to expectations but by way of compensation they frequently turn out to be entirely unlike what may have been anticipated. Ceylon is such a country. I had pictured to myself an island about as large as a medium sized English County, dominated by Adam's Peak and permeated by a glamour of mystery, for as a child I had eagerly and fearfully devoured 'Dead Man's Rock' 'Q's most delightful and thrilling romance wherein Luke Trenoweth searches for the Great Ruby near the summit of Adam's Peak.
In fact however, Ceylon is nearly as large as Scotland, and plentifully adorned with noble mountains, and hundreds if not thousands of miles of forests. I saw the steel blue dagger point of Adam's Peak from a great distance, and there is still a 'mystery' surrounding it, for it is said that millions of yellow butterflies migrate to that great mountain every year and there undergo some transmogrification, becoming, I understand, black instead of yellow.
At Nuwara Eliya I met a collector of golf courses, his bag was one hundred and thirty three, culled from every country in the world, and he was still consulting maps and time-tables, and hotel lists with a view to obtaining further specimens; but I crave leave to doubt, whether in the whole of his vast experience he ever met with a more unique, more sporting, and more exotic course than the links at Nuwara Eliya. It is emphatically an ideal golfer's resort, with plenty of comfortable hotels and bungalows; perched or wedged among the mountains at an altitude of over six thousand feet above sea level.
It possesses in addition to the celebrated course, a lake, a race-course, and unlimited facilities for tennis, fishing and mountaineering. Pedro, the highest peak in Ceylon being but a few miles away. Imagine the French Riviera weather minus the Mistral and you have a fair idea of its climate, though of course you must treat the sun with more respect than is necessary in higher latitudes.
The golf course is of the strath or valley type, the salient features being the surrounding slopes and hills and a stream stocked with good rainbow trout, which is crossed and recrossed sometimes as many as three times at the same hole. At each hole one is offered a variety of the most deadly hazards hitherto utilised, invented, or unavoidably imposed by nature, for the undoing of the medal player and for putting both the long handicap man and the 'Scratch' crack in their proper places.