Being 25 years old, there are few things that entertain me about golfing. Sure, I love the odd hit at a driving range, but the sport has always seemed a little tame.
That was until an opportunity arose to play the world's longest golf course with fairways to make even the most professional golfers snap a driver in frustration.
The Nullarbor Links golf course is the brainchild of Alf Caputo and Bob Bongiorno, two prominent members of the Eyre Highway Operators Association. Over a bottle of wine, the pair wanted to find a way to break up the long drive and reduce drive fatigue on this dead-straight road.
The course officially opened in 2009 and runs for a full 18 holes across a whopping 1365km. While that sounds daunting for even the most excitable ball-whackers, each hole is a standard length ranging from a par three to a par five, but it's the drive in between each hole that adds the length.
Spanning from Ceduna, South Australia to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia (or the other way around, depending on where you start), the average distance between holes is 66km, with the longest gap being 200km.
Anyone can play, with a scorecard costing $78 and an additional $30 if you want to hire clubs. Your scorecard has all the necessary directions on it, but you can realistically tee off from any of the holes and take a hit if you want since they're on public land.
It's certainly an epic journey, one many would think you'd need to tackle in a 4WD or large SUV. Instead, I was plonked at Ceduna for the first hole armed with a Toyota Camry and a dream.
Why a Camry? Well, to quote Sean Hanley, sales and marketing boss of Toyota Australia, "The sedan isn't dead", leaning into the idea that while Australians do heavily prefer a medium SUV, the sedan is still an excellent option.
You're probably wondering where the "most dangerous" part comes from in the headline, considering we are talking about playing golf in a Toyota Camry. Well, there's a hell of a lot of hazards when it comes to tackling this course.
For starters, fatigue is one of the three major causes of death on Australian roads. You're already doing hundreds of kilometres, so throwing being out in the sun with no shade and long amounts of walking to find your ball in the mix suddenly accelerates the risk.
You've then got a plethora of signs telling you to watch out for dingoes, snakes, and spiders. You're about one out-of-bounds hit away from reaching down to grab your ball out of a bush to have a date with the fangs of an eastern brown snake.
Then, of course, there is the remote nature of the Nullarbor. Leaving the small town of Penong, you'll come across a sign entitled "Warning, remote zone ahead. Last shop for 1000km".
From the second I left Ceduna, I didn't have a breath of reception. Breaking down in your golf cart (the Camry), getting bitten by a snake, or collapsing from heat stroke suddenly elevates the danger tenfold.
You really are on your own if you get into trouble out here, so if you shank your shot into the bush, it might just be better to reach into your box of golf balls and grab a new one instead of playing Russian roulette with a snake burrow.
You can't expect to see bright green fairways and straight-shooting greens out here. Instead, you are up against gravelly dirt grounds and greens made from fake grass or soil.
It's full-on; all it takes is for one rock to send your ball closer to Darwin than the hole, and there are a lot of rocks to hit.
Keeping it conservative by not chasing my ball into the bush after shanking it for the 400th time, I successfully managed to dodge all run-ins with snakes. Instead, I met some cheeky crows with an obsession with the balls. In fact, in one hole, I managed to lose three of my shots due to a curious bird likely confusing the round white object with lunch.
I will admit that the least extreme part of the golf trip comes from our choice of caddy, the Toyota Camry. It's best described as the medical shoe of cars, which isn't particularly a bad thing.
It does everything it needs to do extremely well; it's comfortable and safe, but it's not the car you buy if you're looking for a statement. While you may think it's an odd choice to cross the Nullarbor with, it makes sense.
Why equip your massive 4WD with twin tanks and jerry cans on the back when you could easily hit upwards of a 1000km range on a straight road?
Obviously, a hybrid system isn't optimised for the type of driving I was doing, sustaining 110km/h for hours on end, but it still managed to yield an impressive 5.9L/100km from Ceduna to Boarder Village – a 480km journey – including a few spirited overtakes on slow-moving vehicles.
The positive over a 4WD in this situation is the fact that the Eyre Highway is weirdly in better condition than any road I've driven on in Melbourne or Sydney. This means that a light car with suspension optimised for comfort over payload/towing just glides along the road.
I cannot make any comment on the handling, because when you put in directions in your sat-nav anywhere along the Nullarbor, it is quite literally "turn right out of the driveway and then continue straight for 4000000km". And continuing straight is exactly what we did, for kilometres and kilometres.
There was also nothing we couldn't see in the Camry because it was only a two-wheel-drive sedan. Dirt roads to see the pink lakes of Penong, SA, driving on the sand to see the old telegraph station in Euclam WA, or even just the rocky roads to reach tee-off – the Camry just crunched it up.
Predictability never makes for a good feature, but it certainly makes for a good car, and the Camry is by definition predictable.
Crossing the Nullarbor used to be a feat of engineering for a passenger car, but it's now easier than ever. There's no way I would bother paying a home loan in petrol for a giant car, and if I were to do it again, I would certainly opt for a simple two-wheel-drive hybrid.
Nullarbor means 'no trees' in Latin, but it needs a rebrand to Nullanything because there is quite literally nothing out there. Thank god for the golf course to break up the journey because if the fatigue didn't get to me – the boredom would've.
Now, it's just time to nurse my stomach to repair after all of those roadhouse burgers.
Zane Dobie comes from a background of motorcycle journalism, working for notable titles such as Australian Motorcycle News Magazine, Just Bikes and BikeReview. Despite his fresh age, Zane brings a lifetime of racing and hands-on experience. His passion now resides on four wheels as an avid car collector, restorer, drift car pilot and weekend go-kart racer.
