Arriving at Kinloch Golf Club, the Jack Nicklaus design near Taupo, New Zealand

New ZealandJanuary 29, 20152 min read

Dateline January 29, 2015, Golf at the Jack Nicklaus-Designed Kinloch Golf Club

New Zealand 2015 Travel Golf #new-zealand #kinloch #kinloch-golf-club #jack-nicklaus #taupo #links-golf #hawkes-bay #millhills-lodge #cape-kidnappers #ambleside-bnb #pat-and-russell-jensen #golf #new-zealand-australia-2015

Thursday morning it was on to Kinloch Golf Club. We had another wonderful night with Pat and Russell at Ambleside the evening before.

How Kinloch came to be.

Kinloch was designed by Jack Nicklaus about seven years before we played it, for a wealthy New Zealander who had no knowledge of golf at all. Phil, the club's golf professional, gave us his working theory of how the project came together: the owner googled "best golfer in the world," found Jack, and asked him to build a course.

Whatever the process actually was, the result is something. What is most beautiful about the course is that almost none of the land was transformed for it. Nicklaus used the natural contours of the property as the basis for the routing. The course is links-style, with some genuinely difficult carries, but it is one of the most beautiful layouts we had seen up to that point in the trip.

Picking a tee.

There were not many choices on which tee to play. It was 7,000 yards from the tips, 6,500 from the whites, or 5,200 from the reds. So we chose the whites.

It was a little too much for our games. We knew it within the first few holes. We didn't care.

The course.

The links layout is stunning to the eye, with many of the holes genuinely memorable. The routing plays up and down the surrounding hills, and the views from the high points are tremendous.

Of the four New Zealand courses we had played by this point, including Kauri Cliffs, Gulf Harbour, and Wairakei, Kinloch was by far the most interesting and the most challenging. For a low-handicap player, it would be a superb test. For us, it was a very difficult course, but one we would happily play again.

On to Hawke's Bay.

After finishing we headed out for Hawke's Bay and the Millhills Lodge, with a scheduled round at Cape Kidnappers the following day.

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