The Laem Chabang International Country Club is near Pattaya but some way from its lurid realities. The main attraction here is a 27-hole Jack Nicklaus lay out. This is the best golf course on Bangkok's Eastern seaboard, an area of Thailand that saw a boom in course development in the 1990s when bank credit was easy to come by. Laem Chabang is one of six Nicklaus designs in Thailand completed between 1991 and 1994.

The three nines are laid out on land which is laid back from the coast by a few kilometres and contains plenty of original features – notably some rocky Nicklaus extrusions which provide plenty of visual interest. It is also possessed of some natural hilliness, so nature provides some foundation to the design, something that cannot be said about all Nicklaus designs in Asia.

You really wouldn't complain about playing any combination of nines here, but I think the Mountain 9 and then Lake 9 is the best combination and to pick one of the three alone, I would favour the Mountain 9. As the name suggests it is located on more hilly terrain toward the back of the property – though calling it mountainous would be a feat of the imagination. The 1st hole is a short teaser – the golfer is required to pop a ball through a chute of vegetation to a fairway that is at an angle and sloped back toward the tee. This sets up for a short iron to a green that falls away to bunkers on the right side. The 2nd is a conventional downhill par three across some water, nothing remarkable here. Then follows a very attractive sequence of holes, the 422-yard 3rd where the best landing area from the tee brings you close to a well located fairway bunker. The par five 4th at 502 yards is short enough to encourage longer hitters to attempt it in two but this could be foiled by some fairway bunkers that encroach on the right and a large sand area to the front and right of the green.