Caddie's Role: We have reached the time of year when you frequently get asked what your schedule is like for the last couple of months of 2006. However predictable your plans may be up to now it is guess work after mid-October and it is hard to apply much logic to anyone's arrangements. With events in Australia, Asia, America and Africa it is tricky to pin most guys down to a continent let alone a specific tour.

The reason for this has a lot to do with both the success of the golfer and the overall prosperity of golf worldwide. This is Retief's (Goosen) second visit to Asia in four weeks, he was in Seoul, Korea, for their national open three weeks ago; this week we are on Hainan Island off the southern coast of China for the Volkswagen Masters; we come back for the HSBC event in Shanghai early November; and finish off in Asia with the Hong Kong Open the week after.

That's not all, we have Sun City and the South African Open in December and then we get to celebrate Christmas in our respective homes. Provided there are no US wins between now and the year end we will have the first week in January free and maybe start again in Honolulu in the second week of January.

It is becoming very difficult to actually split the years and have a clear break between seasons.

When I caddied in Europe in the late 1980s, I seem to remember the European Masters in Switzerland been held at the end of September as marking the end of the year. That was a time when you played in whatever you were exempt from because it was likely you were going to have a long winter's break anyway.

It is the complete opposite for most players today. With the European Tour starting their year in November in Asia and continuing on in South Africa there is added pressure on players to begin next year's schedule before this year is over.

It is easy to get sucked into playing too much simply because the choice is there. You find those who have a disciplined and sensible plan that allows enough time to rest between events perform better overall. Otherwise you need a lot of resilience.

The trips to Asia with a top player are usually a bit of a junket. That has been frequently, but not always, the case. I remember caddying for Anders Forsbrand in the Philippines Open which was played on the very outskirts of Manila in the early 1990s. We stayed in a swanky hotel downtown. In the morning a chauffeur came to pick us up, not to drive us to the course. He was just giving us a jaunt to the shell of a downtown skyscraper that was being built by the owner of the golf course. Each day a helicopter chopped its way on to the lower roof of the building, we would jump in and made the 15-minute journey over the capital to the course.

At the course a couple of buggies used to transport us over the final 300 yards to the clubhouse.

This was all very embarrassing especially when you happened to arrive as the regular Asia Tour players were peeling themselves out of the official bus which had taken one and a half hours from their hotel, and they happened to see you jump out of the chopper.

I suppose that is what makes the game so competitive. The sight of some named players (and their bagmen) falling out of choppers would probably be an incentive to get invited back as a star to play in Asia instead of as a full-time competitor enduring three-hour daily trips to and from the course every week.

I also recall the earlier days in Asia when the European Tour ground to a halt in September. Me and a colleague started our own global tour. We used to both caddie and make yardage books on the eight to 10-week Asian Tour at the time. This was no junket. We were not doing the books for some extra profit, we made books in order to try to break even on the trip.

At the army-owned club in Bangkok, Thailand, we were the unfortunate victims of some military might. There had been a simple misunderstanding which nearly turned into an international incident. It involved the printing rights to the very basic hand-made yardage books we were providing the pros with. The upshot was that our documents were ripped up and tossed into a nearby bin and we were frog-marched at gun-point out of the Bangkok Army Country Club in timing with the squeak of our overheated caddie trainers.

There were some disappointed customers and a couple of rattled entrepreneurial caddies who changed their strategy after the incident and decided to stick to the day job for the rest of the Asian Tour.

I arrived on the holiday island of Hainan yesterday, completing the final leg of a long and winding trip eastwards. There were some Asian tour players on the flight, most of them had come from last week's event in Taipei. I was greeted at the airport by a chauffeur in keeping with Asian junket tradition. The regular players made their own ways to their hotels. The yardage books this week, I am assured, will not attract any military intervention.