DeLaWho? DeLaWhat? DeLaWhere?

Courtesy of the New York Times
ARVAYHEER, Mongolia — André Tolmé sized up the day's golfing terrain — thousands of yards of treeless steppe rolling toward a distant horizon. Without a golfer to be seen for 100 miles around, he loosened up at his own pace, taking practice swings with a 3-iron.

Then, with a powerful clockwise whirl and a satisfying swak! he sent the little white ball soaring far into the clear blue Mongolian sky.

"I feel good about that shot," Mr. Tolmé said, intently tracking the ball until it disappeared from view. "You could just hit the ball forever here."

In a sense, he is. This summer, Mr. Tolmé, a civil engineer from New Hampshire, is golfing across Mongolia. Treating this enormous Central Asian nation as his private course, he has divided Mongolia into 18 holes. The total fairway distance is 2,322,000 yards. Par is 11,880 strokes.

"You hit the ball," he said, explaining his technique in a land without fences, a nation that is twice the size of Texas. "Then you go and find it. Then you hit it again. And again. And again."

Moving across the rolling steppe, he is walking a route favored almost a millennium ago by Genghis Khan. The fairway may be something less than manicured, but to the north are Siberian forests and to the south is the Gobi Desert, one of the world's largest sand traps.

With his caddy, Khatanbaatar, carrying water, food and a tent in a Russian jeep customized with an upholstery of hand-woven rugs, Mr. Tolmé teed off May 28 and calculates he will finish his game in the trading center of Dund-Us, which is also known as Khovd, sometime around the end of July. (read on)