In China’s Hainan, championship-level golf courses, food and spas galore
The challenging Blackstone course in Haikou city is the ‘crown jewel’ of the Mission Hills Resort.
WHEN this latest invitation came to take another golfing trip to China, I had some initial reservations about heading there again, having already played at some of the best courses in the country many times over the years.
Among the more memorable trips was to the 12-course Mission Hills Shenzhen, which is the world’s largest golf complex as accredited by Guinness World Records.
The courses there are designed by some of the game’s greatest legends, with one course by Jack Nicklaus staging the 1995 World Cup of Golf and being the first one to be accredited by the US Professional Golfers’ Association.
Giving it a shot
As such, I was intrigued enough to want to check out the courses at Mission Hills Resort Haikou, with its official website describing the venue as being situated “amid lush green gardens with an 18-storey resort block, a ninestorey resort annex and a three-storey clubhouse”.
Haikou is the capital and the most populous city of China’s Hainan province. The city, which has a population of about two million, is located on the northern coast of Hainan, not far from the mouth of the Nandu River.
American golfer Tiger Woods, who played a round at the Haikou resort back in 2013, described its famed Blackstone course as “one of the best in the world”.
A short three-hour direct flight from Singapore and I found myself in Haikou. Having now experienced Blackstone for myself, I cannot agree more with Woods’ assessment of a championship-standard course that many hail as the resort’s “crown jewel”.
It is a brilliant 350-acre course that challenges players as they make their way through centuries-old houses, shrines, gravesites, trees, vegetation, lakes and wetlands.
It certainly was a true test of golfing ability
The city of Haikou is a food paradise, with the countless restaurants serving up local fare such as chicken, duck, lamb and crab.
and I was not ashamed to hit a century on my scorecard.
Our group also had the chance to play at the Lava Fields course, which as the name suggests is laden with lava rocks.
The course’s large, rugged and wild bunkers create a visual feat but it was also unforgiving as I found out from the tee-off; five sand traps greeted me on the first hole.
Much of Hainan island sits atop the Qiongbei volcanic cluster, which 10,000 years ago spewed lava across the 20 square-km area occupied by Mission Hills.
We also had the opportunity to play at the 36-hole The Dunes at Shenzhou Peninsula, located on the south side of the island and accessible via a high-speed train journey that takes about an hour from Haikou.
While the undulating fairways can be a challenge, the large greens offer some muchneeded relief from the rough and rugged dunes.
Culinary delights
There is plenty to do in Hainan besides playing golf every day, and one favourite activity is to indulge in all the cuisines that the city has to offer.
Some of the popular fruits in season during our trip were longans and coconuts, which mainly come from the Xianglin vegetable and fruit base in Dongfang, another city in Hainan. We were told that the longans are supplied to many parts of China, and exported to different parts of Europe and the United States.
Hainan also boasts a thriving coconut industry with nearly 400 sq km of coconut trees that yield about 250 million fruits each year. Coconuts have become a cultural icon of Hainan.
The city of Haikou itself is a food paradise, with the countless restaurants serving up local fare such as chicken, duck, lamb and crab.
After all the feasting, burn off some of those calories by heading to the city’s old town quarter where there are many historical sites with a mixture of styles such as Portuguese, French, British and South-east Asian architecture.
For something more relaxing, one can relax at Mission Hills Haikou’s Volcanic Spring Valley, the world’s largest spring spa resort which has 168 hot and cold pools and nearly a 100 water features.
At the end of our five-day stay, many of us felt that we could easily spend another week there to soak in all the sights and wonders of the city.