Cape Kidnappers Golf Course

Few golf courses anywhere in the world command a setting quite like this one. Cape Kidnappers was designed by Tom Doak and opened in 2004 on the clifftop farmland of Julian Robertson's Farm Cove Estate, perching fairways and greens on dramatic ridgelines and peninsulas that jut out above a 140-metre drop to the Pacific Ocean below. Doak worked with the land's natural contours — the gannet colony headland, the deep ravines cutting between the ridges — rather than against them, producing a course widely considered among his finest work and one of the most visually spectacular anywhere on earth. It has ranked consistently in Golf Magazine's Top 100 Courses in the World.

Hawke's Bay sits on the eastern coast of New Zealand's North Island, a region celebrated for its Art Deco architecture in nearby Napier, its wine production, and a warm, dry climate that makes it one of NZ's more reliable golf destinations year-round.

Getting here requires commitment — a 4WD tractor transfer along the coastline at low tide is part of the journey — but Cape Kidnappers rewards that effort at every turn. The back 9, where holes track along exposed clifftop spines with the ocean visible on both sides, is simply unlike anything else in the game.