Sowa

Sowa sits on the edge of one of the most extraordinary landscapes in southern Africa. The town — also spelled Sua — borders the Sua Pan, a vast salt flat that forms the eastern arm of the Makgadikgadi Pans, among the largest salt pans on earth. This is semi-arid country, stark and luminous, where the horizon seems to stretch beyond any reasonable limit and the quality of light at certain hours is genuinely unlike anywhere else on the continent.

What an 18-hole, par-72 layout means in this context is worth pausing on. Golf courses in Botswana are rare enough; courses in the remote northeast of the country are rarer still. Sowa exists largely to serve the community built around Botash, the soda ash extraction operation that brought a working town into being here in the 1990s. That company-town DNA almost certainly shapes the club's character — a practical, community-focused layout rather than a resort showpiece.

Expect a course defined by its environment: spare vegetation, hard ground, and the particular demands of dryland golf, where local knowledge and course management count for more than raw distance.