Glenorchy Golf Club

Few settings in world golf match the sheer drama of Glenorchy's backdrop. The course sits at the northern end of Lake Wakatipu, deep in the Otago region of New Zealand's South Island, where the Dart and Rees rivers fan out across a glacial valley floor ringed by the towering peaks of the Richardson and Thomson ranges. This is the edge of Mount Aspiring National Park, a landscape so extreme it doubled as Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings films — and the golf course exists within it with a kind of cheerful audacity.

Glenorchy Golf Club is a community layout that makes no pretense of being a championship test. It's a short, rural course maintained and loved by locals in a town of a few hundred people, where the rules are relaxed, the honesty box does the work of a pro shop, and the mountains do the work of everything else. Sheep and the occasional wandering bird are as likely to share the fairways as fellow golfers.

For visiting players, the appeal is less about the scorecard and entirely about the experience of swinging a club in one of the most spectacular valleys on the planet. Queenstown is only 45 minutes south along the lake, making Glenorchy an easy detour for golfers staying in the region who want something genuinely unlike anywhere else they've played.