New Kuta
New Kuta is a layout that leaves you wanting more - both in a good way and a bad way. It is not that Ronald Fream’s crafty design has a shortage of quality holes. It is just that the course’s run of truly stratospheric ones seems to come and go all too quickly.
That stretch - labeled by some as the closest thing Bali has to Amen Corner at Augusta National - occurs between number 14 and 16. Here, the layout, which makes scant use of its location on a headland between New Kuta Beach and Balangan Beach on previous holes, gets up close and personal with the ocean.
The 14th is an absolute gem of a par-4. It is not short at 440-odd yards, but the sight of the downhill fairway tumbling down to the aqua-blue waters of the Indian Ocean makes a lusty hit with a driver a distinct temptation. The next difficult part of the equation, meanwhile, comes with an approach that needs to be played to a green sandwiched between the ball-hungry brine and a nasty pot bunker.
It is immediately followed by another cliff top beauty, the short 15th where its beauty and apparent benign nature is belied by the particularly untropical crosswinds that frequently buffer the headland. With that, however, the course heads back inland and, after the tricky drive on the par-4 16th, the sea becomes a memory.
You can’t help feeling that more could have been made of the course’s prime location. That’s not to say that there’s not an awful lot to like elsewhere however. The short sixth features a tough - almost 200-yard - tee shot to a flamboyant putting surface completely encircled by sand while its successor, the dogleg seventh, needs two precise and perfectly struck shots to hold its plateau green.
US$170
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