Sabi River Sun Golf Club

Hazyview sits at the edge of the Mpumalanga lowveld, just a few kilometers from the Paul Kruger Gate entrance to Kruger National Park — which tells you nearly everything you need to know about the setting here. This is big-sky bushveld country, where the Sabie River winds through fever trees and marula groves, and where the wildlife that wanders the fairways is emphatically not decorative.

Sabi River Sun is a resort course attached to the Sun International hotel property, designed for guests who want to play golf in one of southern Africa's most dramatic landscapes. Par 71 layouts often favor accuracy and course management over raw power, and the lowveld terrain — with its rocky outcrops, seasonal watercourses, and indigenous bush — gives architects natural hazards that no designer could improve upon. The heat and altitude of the region add their own variables to club selection.

A round here is genuinely unlike most golf experiences. The game is almost secondary to the sensation of playing inside a landscape where impala and warthog are routine gallery members and the distant sounds are rarely human.