I made another daring attempt to experience golf in Sao Paulo. It’s simply not easy in this part of the world. There are very few golf courses out here. Most are private, some may require a member accompanying you, and the public courses are few and far away.
After much research, I decided to pay a visit to the closest public course, Sao Fransisco Golf Clube1 in Osasco, which is another little city in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area. It cost me R$ 125 to get there and back (a good 45 minutes each way), R$ 140 to play 18 holes (in actuality, it is 9 holes repeated twice), R$ 70 for the caddy (mandatory), and R$15 for golf range use with a small bucket of balls. So $170 US for a normal round of golf…I can’t see this being a local pass time around here!;)
The course is pretty decent. A quirky/interesting thing about it is that it has pond full of crocodiles that were brought in from afar. They also had quite a few trees bearing the Joboticaba fruit…very tasty…unfortunately, not many had ripened yet. Apparently, this fruit has a very short shelf life2…explains why we don’t see it in the land where almost everything is available i.e. good ole US of A.
I had a pretty decent round. The caddy was nailing it whenever I asked him to play too…I put a stop to that soon enough;) There was barely anyone playing, maybe because it was a week day. Another interesting thing was that a policeman was doing the rounds on the golf course on a motorcycle. I’m not sure what kind of trouble he expected out here.
All in all, I’d say it is not a wise decision to fly in your clubs to Brazil unless you have many rounds of golf booked in advance as part of some affordable golf package.