Thailand

I’ll be speaking at the Thailand Golf Travel Mart in Khao Yai next week as part of the Thailand Golf Paradise seminar about course design, renovation, maintenance, and operations. These are the slides for my presentation about the best playing conditions with the fewest inputs.

Many of you will have seen the Kantarat Golf Course when flying into Bangkok. Maybe you’ve played it. It sits between the two runways at Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok.

This was a new one to me. I saw the course laid out at the Ayutthaya Historical Park and thought it looked similar to Park Golf. But where Park Golf involves hitting the ball into a hole, a woodball hole is completed when the ball passes through a gate.

I took 82 flights in 2016, for a total of 221,494 km (137,000 miles), and I’ve just mapped them. That’s more than 5 times the circumference of the earth. Routes flown once are more blue, and the routes flown more often are more red.

While Eric Reasor was collecting the data on ball roll dispersion in Thailand – read yesterday’s post for more about that – I collected data on the the same greens.

When Eric Reasor flew from Tennessee to Thailand, he brought along measuring tools to assess how golf balls roll across putting greens. He visited 22 golf courses in 5 days.

I made a map of all the flights I took in 2015.1 After seeing the map, I scrolled through my photos from these places. It was an extraordinary year for studying grass around the world.

One of the best places to study tropical grasses in Southeast Asia is at the Suanluang Rama IX Public Park in Bangkok’s Prawet District. The two primary species on lawns at Suanluang Rama IX are tropical carpetgrass (Axonopus compressus) in shaded areas and manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) in open areas.

… it doesn’t. In fact, there is one variety of manilagrass (Zoysia matrella) that consistently grows faster than bermudagrass in Southeast Asia. I’ve had occasion to study and measure this grass, and there is no doubt that it grows faster than bermuda here.

I measured soil moisture and surface hardness on three fairways, approaches, and greens at a golf course in Thailand in September 2014. The fairways and approaches at this site are seashore paspalum on a sandcap.