The World’s Most Unique Golf Courses
Golfing holidays have become increasingly popular over the past decade and are a perfect way to unwind and catch a tan, whilst also enabling a healthy dose of rivalry to take place during your break. If you’re thinking of booking such a sporting vacation, you’ll be pleased to know that golf courses are popping up at a steady rate in pretty much every country you can name. However if you’re looking for something a little more unique, there are also a number of golf courses which are bizarre enough to become talking points in their own right, even before you’ve managed to buckle your first club.
To help you in your quest, here are just some of the world’s strangest golf courses and holes.
Brickyard Crossing Golf Course
Boasting a ridiculously vast seating capacity of 257,000+, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is comfortably the world’s highest capacity sports facility on Earth and is host to a number of high profile racing events throughout the year due to it’s world-famous 2.5 mile track. What many people fail to realise however, is that within the confines of said track sits four holes of Brickyard Crossing Golf Resort, an 18-hole course designed by Pete Dye which has itself been home to various golfing events over the years. The backstretch of the track separates the four-hole loop from the remaining 14 holes, and there’s even a water hazard within the track in the form of a lake.
Legend Golf & Safari Resort
Should you choose to holiday in the vicinity of the 22,000 hectare Entabeni Safari Conservancy in South Africa, make an effort to play at least one round of golf at The Legend Golf Resort, surely one of the most beautiful courses yet to be created. If the surrounding scenery isn’t enough to guarantee your attendance, just take a look at the aptly named ‘Extreme 19th Hole’ in the photographs above and reconsider. The good news: it’s a par 3. The bad news: you need to jump in a helicopter to reach the tee, which is situated nearly half a kilometre above the green, near the tip of Hangslip mountain.
This is how it should be tackled:
The Movable, Floating Green
When designer Scot Mills unveiled the stunning Coeur d’Alene Resort Golf Course in Idaho it was obvious that sooner or later his work would win an award, and Golf Digest soon presented it when naming the course top in the category ‘Beauty and Aesthetics’. But beautiful golf courses aren’t unique. What is unique though, is the course’s 14th hole, pictured above. This is, according to its owners, ‘the world’s only par 3 floating movable island green’ and due to its location is only reachable via its charming, dedicated Putter Boat shuttle.
Truly International Golf
There are couple of reasons to take a golfing vacation at the Green Zone Golf Club. First of all, due to the course being located in Lappi, Finland, it’s possible to play a round at any time during the day or night in golfing season, as the sun doesn’t go down for months. Couple this with the fact that 9 holes are in Finland, the other 9 in Sweden and you have the ability to play a round of golf in two countries at 2am whilst the sun is still shining. If that isn’t a unique golfing experience, I don’t know what is.
Coober Pedy Opal Fields
Coober Pedy is a small mining town in Southern Australia, famous due to the majority of its inhabitants living underground to avoid the unbearable heat which bears down on the area throughout the year. It’s a surprise there’s a golf course at all. However it’s not a surprise to learn that the golf course which does exist above ground in Coober Pedy is without a single blade of grass, golfers choosing instead to carry a patch of turf around the course from which to tee-off. Also, due to the aforementioned heat, the majority of the golfing takes place at night using glowing balls.
Some dusty golfing takes place at 1:43 in the following video.
The Longest Round
While you’re in Australia, why not have a quick round at Nullarbor Links? The 18 hole course only stretches 1,365 kilometres along the coast of South Australia after all. Officially the world’s longest golf course, Nullarbor Links opened in recent months to a flurry of disbelief, mainly due to the fact that the average distance between holes is a whopping 66 kilometres. In fact, two of the course’s holes are separated by approximately 200 kilometres of land, meaning you’ll need something more powerful than a Golf Cart to cover the 18 holes in anything less than a few weeks.
Clashing Rocks
Although now not as bizarre following a redesign, special mention must go to the original layout of ‘Clashing Rocks’, the 7th hole at Stone Harbor Golf Club in New Jersey. The course’s designer, Desmond Muirhead, was asked to design 18 unique holes back in the late 1980s and whilst all were certainly interesting, none confused as many people as the 7th; a par-3 whose green sat alone in the water, flanked by two jagged bunkers supposedly inspired by Jason and the Argonauts. Unfortunately such a green proved problematic, hence its current modified appearance.
