Nine iron or machete?

I hadn't played a round of golf in four years and was expecting to wait at least another year until I hit the links again.

Then Avery and I learned about the Amazon Golf Club where you can play 18 holes, rent all necessary equipment, get 12 golf balls and five tees, and come back with tons of stories for only $25.

The Amazon Golf Club doesn't quite have the same mystique as some of the famed cathedrals of the game.

The road might be unpaved and full of potholes. There isn't not even a sign advertising its existence.

The clubhouse looks as if it were designed in the rural, jungle house style. That's probably because it is a rural, jungle house. Some guy greeted us in his boxers when we showed up at 8:30 a.m.

This is the "chicken coup free drop" rule. How many golf club have their own chickens?

We mixed and matched clubs from their sets to put together two "full" sets. Because of the potential "hazards" one might face at the Amazon Golf Club, no set of clubs is complete without the machete wedge. It's not actually used to advance the ball. Its utility is in the killing of snakes, slashing the high grass as you search for your errant drive. and opening coconuts that have fallen on the course.

After a couple of minutes on the practice green, which was also the 9th green, we were ready to hit the course. The course manager said it had been raining a lot lately This meant that we came on the only dry day in the last two weeks and that he hasn't mowed the greens for awhile.

The greens played like fairways. The fairways played like the rough. And finding your ball in the overgrown rough was almost a lost cause.

Avery started his day well with a nice drive and chip on the opening par 3 to set up a par putt, which he missed. I, on the other hand, was a little errant off the tee and couldn't find my ball in the rough. I dropped one and made an up and down for a bogey.

On the second hole, I took a pitching wedge from 100 yards out (at least that's how long it looked) and stuck it to within a few feet of the pin. That was the highlight of the round. In fact, I told Avery as soon as we got up to the green that I should just call it a day.

Fortunately, we didn't. Although we didn't put up a really low number, we had a great time.

The course itself is an old cow pasture that an expat and some of his investor friends converted into a nine-hole, par 35 course. No one is going to confuse this with a Robert Trent Jones Masterpiece, but there were some definite local quirks .

The old irrigation and drainage lines became the water hazards. One of the par threes featured something close to an island green, and the eighth fairway doubles as the driving range.

While walking the course, we picked up a handful of balls (while losing our fair share) that we obviously had no use for after the round. We went to the clubhouse and bartered the manager to exchange one beer for the balls. He agreed.  (Backpackers become economists. again)

I don't think I'll play another round on this trip. The opportunity to golf in the middle of the Amazon, on a converted cow pasture, was a surreal experience and something we couldn't turn down. (I'm not a big fan of cow pastures in the rain forest, which made this even better).

Note: Every day on The River we wore the same two shirts. But when you're golfing, you have wear collared shirts, right?