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Fairways Less Traveled
Venture off the beaten golf track and you might just discover a gem of a course. By Thomas Bedell
When it comes to discovering new golf courses, golfers are a little like bird-watchers: They always enjoy adding new species to the list. While the suggestions here might not leap first to mind when you’re thinking golf vacation, visiting a fairway less traveled might make all the difference in creating new favorites.
VIETNAM
True, a golfing vacation in Vietnam is a pretty odd concept. With 10 great courses, and fully two dozen more in some stage of development (talk of a Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail to connect them all may be another boggling thought), the country is a golfer’s undiscovered paradise.
The Dalat Palace and the Ocean Dunes golf clubs are considered the top picks in the country (www.vietnamgolfresorts.com). Like Denver, Dalat is a mile-high city, and the 70-year-old golf resort, a 30-minute flight from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), has a certain alpine ambience, the holes playing along hillside terrain dotted with pines and overlooking the sparkling Xuan Huong Lake. The five-star Sofitel Dalat Palace is the hotel of choice. Both course and hotel were built in 1922 at Emperor Bao Dai’s dictate, and refurbished to their former glory in 1994.
The Nick Faldo-designed Ocean Dunes Golf Club opened in coastal Phan Thiet 10 years ago, and is aptly named. The routing through the dunes off the Eastern Sea gives a decided touch of links golf, although the tropical winds won’t generate any thoughts of Scotland. Hawaii, maybe. The elevated par-3 ninth, requiring a 150-yard dart between dunes, trees, and a grassy mound, has been named by GOLF Magazine as one of the best 500 holes in the world. The beachfront is best enjoyed at the adjacent Novotel Phan Thiet Resort.
Most of the new golf development in Vietnam is unfolding in the north. A second 18-hole course will open this year at the Chi Linh Star Golf Club, an 800-acre spread about an hour’s drive from Hanoi. The original track hosted an Asian PGA Tour event in 2005, and virtually defines the exotic golf experience (www.chilinhstargolf.com.vn).
CZECH REPUBLIC
The bourgeois sport of golf did not fare well in Eastern Europe under Communist rule. In 1948 golf was declared “an undesirable sport” in Czechoslovakia, and even by 1990 there were only three golf courses in the Czech Republic. Now there are almost 70, a craze taken recent note of by the International Association of Golf Tour Operators, which selected the country as its 2007 “Undiscovered Golf Destination of the Year” (www.cgta.cz).
Visitors are most likely to zero in on the courses near the well-known mineral spring spa towns west of Prague, Marianske Lazne (perhaps better known by the German name, Marienbad), or Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad). The Royal Golf Club of Marianske Lazne comes by its name due to its founder, King Edward VII of England, who started the club in 1905. That makes this the oldest 18-hole course in the nation, and a top choice. Its small but well-bunkered greens retain an old-world charm, the fairways bordered by pine forest (www.golfml.cz).
The Gentleman’s Fencing Club of Karlovy Vary founded a nine-hole course in 1904, but the current 18-hole track is on different ground, an appealing Bohemia woodland setting coursing through a hilly valley (www.golfresort.cz). The Astoria Golf Club Cihelny opened in 2001, a Gary Player design in the picturesque Tepla River valley (www.astoria-golf.cz). All three courses are well served by a stay at the 18th-century Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary (www.pupp.cz).
The best post-round Pilsner beer possible is at Golf Park Plzen (www.golfparkpl.cz/en), since the town is home of the original Pilsner beer, Pilsner Urquell. Players may need it: The 2004 design by Christopher Stadtler is said to be tough. Golf Park Plzen is about an hour’s drive from Prague.
Samuel L. Jackson and Sean Connery have been spotted at the Golf Resort
Karlstejn, about a half-hour from the capital city, and well within view of the 14th-century Karlstejn Castle (http://www.karlstejn-golf.cz).
SOUTHEAST ITALY
Motoring east from Naples along the Amalfi Coast is one of the most beautiful drives in the world, and more than a little thrilling. For those with the fortitude to keep going toward the heel of the boot and the Adriatic Sea, Apulian treasures await, along with great food and wine.
A pair of courses south of Brindisi near the Gulf of Taranto are under the same ownership, but couldn’t be more different in character. Riva dei Tessali is a full-scale resort in a gated enclave, and the course plays through tight, tree-lined fairways. It’s demanding enough that the Challenge European Tour (the continental equivalent of the U.S. Nationwide Tour) holds an annual tournament at the course to discover rising stars, native son Costantino Rocca being one who rose to fame through the CET.
Riva dei Tessali’s sister course, Metaponto, is about 10 minutes away but worlds apart in its sun-baked, wide-open play, winding through olive groves and orange trees. The clubhouse is a 19th-century farmhouse, including luxury guestrooms overlooking the course and a view to the ocean (www.rivadeitessali.it).
Six miles east of Lecce and right on the Adriatic coast in San Cataldo, the five-star Acaya Golf Hotel opened in 2003. Thoroughly modern, it nonetheless maintains an unearthly but appealing end-of-the-road feel. The course has a similar seaside aura to it, most of the challenge arising from encroaching masque bushes, a typical Mediterranean vegetation. The clubhouse is a stonework beauty, the former Masseria San Pietro, a fortified 17th-century farmhouse (www.acayagolfhotel.it).
Halfway between Brindisi and Bari is a double-faceted gem: the Masseria San Domenico Resort and Spa, and the San Domenico Golf Course. The resort is set amidst an ancient silver olive grove, and the main dining room is housed in a white-stone 15th-century watchtower once used by the Knights of Malta to warn against Ottoman attacks. It’s all about luxury now, including the Spa Thalassotherapy, a private beach, and exquisite dining (www.imasseria.com).
The golf course is a top-notch track from European Golf Design, an intriguing blend of desert and seaside golf elements. It’s a short drive from the hotel, but there’s also the option of staying in the Masseria Cimino, a 15-room guesthouse right on the eighth hole, part of it unearthed from the ancient Roman empire city of Egnatia.
ANGUILLA
The Anguilla Golf Association founded a modest pitch and putt course in 2001, and it represented the only golf to be found on this 16-mile-long, three-mile-wide island (25 square miles in all) at the northernmost end of the Leeward Islands of the British West Indies. As of November, things changed dramatically when the Temenos Golf Club opened with all due fanfare. Local officials, developers, and designer Greg Norman showed up for the ceremonial first swing by local children, and then the play began in earnest at Norman’s attractive and challenging effort. (The DaVinci Code author Dan Brown was spotted among the foursomes.)
The course offers dramatic views of St. Maarten and nearby islands in the Caribbean right from the first tee, and with lively tradewinds often at play, just keeping the ball on the spacious fairways is a test, with sand, salt ponds, and marshes looking to gobble up balls. Several holes play back toward the blazingly white 28,000-square-foot clubhouse, where one can ponder eating post-round at Zurra, a new Mediterranean-influenced restaurant managed by restaurateurs, authors, and lifestyle experts Bob and Melinda Blanchard.
The course, managed by Troon Golf, is the cornerstone of a St. Regis resort and residential development, with homes ranging from $1.4 to $12.5 million, and going fast (www.stregisresidences.com). The hotel and Remède Spa will open in late 2008, although three exclusive four- and five-master suite villas are already available for rental.
Or one could stay in the meantime at the likes of the elegant Malliouhana Hotel & Spa (www.malliouhana.com).
VERMONT
Back in the U.S.A., my home state of Vermont doesn’t get the respect it deserves for its fine courses, probably due to the six-month golf season (eight for the hardy). But Vermont isn’t called the Green Mountain State for frivolous reasons. What makes for fine skiing grounds when the snow flies makes for some beautiful vistas, if intriguing sidehill, downhill, or uphill lies, when the golf balls are flying.
There are slightly more courses in the state than in the Czech Republic, with the ski area courses perhaps the best known, those at Stowe, Stratton, Mount Snow, Okemo, and Killington. (For a general guide: www.travel-vermont.com/recreation/golf.asp.) Up in the Northeast Kingdom, the Jay Peak Championship Golf Course, designed by Graham Cooke, opened nine holes last year. The full 18 and new clubhouse will open this summer (www.jaypeakresort.com).
The Vermont National Country Club (www.vnccgolf.com) is the only Nicklaus design in the state, by Jack and Jack II, near Vermont’s greatest metropolis, Burlington (at about 39,000 population).
Farther south are the resort courses in the ingratiating villages of Woodstock and Manchester. Laurence S. Rockefeller purchased the assets of the Woodstock Country Club in 1961, and subsequently that of the Woodstock Inn as well, turning the entire property into a desirable package deal (www.woodstockinn.com). The country club dates from 1895, though the current site and design were done by Robert Trent Jones, Sr., in 1961, and it’s a quirky example of packing large scale complexity into a compact plot (only 6,001 yards from the back tees) with six par-3s, playing to a par-69. But the course crosses the Kedron Brook 12 times, the fairways are narrow, and the greens are small. The course looks easy only on paper.
The Gleneagles Golf Course at The Equinox Resort in Manchester Village (www.equinoxresort.com) is one of Vermont’s best — a course of immaculate grooming, a varied routing, and in an idyllic mountain setting. Designed by Walter Travis in 1927, the course was renovated by Trent Jones’ son, Rees, in 1991, maintaining the original routing.
Last year the Orvis Cup Hickory Stick Shaft Pro-Am Tournament was held here, the first professional purse for a hickories-only format, with $10,000 in money and prizes on the line. Period attire was optional, but most players went with the retro garb, and the event was deemed a success. Look for dates of the Second Annual Orvis Cup to be announced soon, then start polishing the mashie niblick.
Keep heading south and not all that far from the state line (and about three and a half hours from Manhattan) is the Brattleboro Country Club, a semi-private course dating from 1914 that was expanded to 18 holes, from nine, in 2000 by Vermont favorite son, designer Steve Durkee. Drop by and we could have a game here together (www.brattleborogolf.com). Unless I’m off in Vietnam.
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