What a round of golf in New Zealand actually asks of you

A client once asked me, on the 14th tee at Cape Kidnappers, why nobody had mentioned his handicap all week. I told him I had stopped listening for it around day three. He looked almost relieved. That doesn’t mean golf is incidental on these trips. It isn’t. Tee times, slope ratings, signature holes all matter to the people who book a golf journey through New Zealand. Golf is not incidental on these trips; it’s the planned purpose for several days. Sometimes is the very reason the itinerary exists at all, with tee times that get the same weight as flights. Some of Aroha Luxury New Zealand Tours‘ guests have spent decades building a private list of courses they want to play before they’re done, and five new names in a fortnight is no small thing to them. Others are couples who took up the game together once the kids left home, and have quietly built a marriage around what is, essentially, a very long walk. A few, I suspect, book a golf tour partly because eighteen holes is a perfectly respectable reason to be unreachable for four hours. Whatever brought them to the game, nobody here is treating golf as background. A links course on the edge of the Pacific plays differently when the w...