On Saturday, May 14, we participated in the Ambassador’s Cup 2005 Annual Charity Golf Tournament, put on by the American Association of Singapore. There were a total of 288 golfers playing from a shotgun start on two eighteen hole courses at Palm Resort in Malaysia, about 1 hour north of Singapore.

Click on any picture to see a larger image. The images have been reduced in quality for smaller size and less bandwidth. If you want the camera original, please drop me an email. Some of the pictures captured by the camera will never be released!

All entrants received a very good quality tote bag, and it was filled with all sorts of goodies including a nice golf shirt, and a cap.

The road trip begins… and it is quite crowded with five in the Merc. In the back seat we have Jesus, Ann Marie, and Crissy, who is rather hidden by the headrest. The tournament was help at the Palm Resort which is very near the Senia airport in southern Malaysia… about a one hour ride by automobile from Singapore. The ride up is on excellent freeway… much like the US Interstate system, except that we are driving on the left side of the road. Oh, and road kill included a monkey… I don’t believe you’ll see that in Texas.

This is my first time to Malaysia and I find the country side quite beautiful. It is kind of mountainous… not real high but very rolling terrain… and in some parts the ground is covered with palm oil trees as far as the eye can see… quite impressive. It is hard to get the great landscape shots from a fast moving care, especially when the camera gods do not cooperate… so here is just a taste of what it looks like.

John Tasker has a beautiful new Harley Davidson… a great yellow color. Such a road trip dictated that he ride it up. So, we carried his girl friend and golf clubs while he had a lot of fun riding the scooter… well, maybe not total fun… he got rained on quite a bit in Singapore… but it cleared up later… the spots on the pictures is water on the car windows.

The hotel was very nice, quite large, and very well furnished. It cost less than $40 US per night to stay in very nice surroundings with very attentive staff. A picture of the entrance, my room, and the pool area… note that the poolside bar has its stools in the water.

A view of the lobby and a couple of fish tanks in the bar.

John got a spot right in front of the hotel to park his scooter.

This is Brandon, young son of John and Sara Cunningham.

ONTO THE GOLF!

The golfing activities began with a sign in, followed by lunch. Here is a picture of our lunch table, followed by a shot of the field getting ready to hit the links. This was a very well organized tournament. Considering there were 288 people playing, it went very well… no delays in play, at least none for us.

Ahhh… the mandatory foursome foto… first, as the handsome gentlemen we are and then posed as we are told to ham it up. Yeh, right!

Next, these are pictures of various parts of the course. It is a great course, both in terms of picturesque views and the challenge of the holes.

John drained an absolutely fabulous downhill put… I am sure the length will increase over time… but this was a solid 50 feet… his picture captures the look of satisfaction for all history.

There were monitor lizards all over the course. The smaller guy in the drainage ditch was about 2.5 feet long, the other one (harder to photograph because he was moving fast) was about 4 feet long. I’d hate to find one of these in my pajamas… which is one reason I don’t wear pajamas.

No set of golf pictures would be complete without the participants in action. We’ve got John and John, then Jesus and Wayne, followed by John’s demonstration of the correct grip.

Well, that pretty much ended the day on the links… a great time, although we didn’t make the playoffs. We headed back for the after game margarita party where the winners were announced.

They didn’t cook it for us but it looked so good it deserves a picture anyway.

After the margarita party, we showered and dressed for dinner. Now, we had free beer all day as we played golf, then free margaritas after golf, so what do we have with dinner? Free wine and beer, of course, and it wasn’t too long before we were all feeling quite good. This caused John to become a camera maniac, and posted here are but a small sample of the photos he took at the dinner.

Now, as it turns out, we had the worst score of the day and were presented with the consolation prize at the dinner. We each received a pair of swim fins. Well, what can I say. There was water, there were the swim fins, and there was the wine… a lot of it. John kept snapping photos, so they make the web as well.

This would have been a great place to end the party, and indeed, the dinner did formally end at this point. So what did a handful of us do? Head for the bar, naturally, where we consumed far too much additional alcohol. Now John became an absolute camera mad man, shooting more than 70 pictures in the bar. I have mercifully removed the majority of them, including the pictures he took of me sound asleep in the bar. These should be representative, however… it’s not often that I wear flippers on my ears.

That’s the end folks… we did NOT get up for the 7 AM game of golf we had originally envisioned but it was a great time with good friends. Can’t wait to do it again next year.

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