Golf at Te Aria is an escape into nature’s raw beauty. Ashley Mayo There’s a certain madness that drives a person to book a 7,700-mile journey to New Zealand’s northern coast, all for a few rounds of golf. Or.
..is there? The trek from the U.
S. to New Zealand is long, but surprisingly easy. One afternoon in early November, my husband and I flew from Nashville, had a quick layover in Los Angeles, and 13 hours later, landed in Auckland.
Even after that much time in the air, we felt energized as we began the final leg of our journey — a 90-minute drive from Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, to Te Arai , the country’s most stunning golf destination. This was a return trip for us. We’d visited six years earlier to play Tara Iti, a private course that debuted at No.
29 on GOLF Magazine’s ranking of the Top 100 Courses in the World in 2017; it has since climbed up to 20th. We stayed there for two nights, then spent the next two weeks driving from the North Island down to Queenstown, the southern tip of the South Island. We hiked and teed it up from stop to stop.
After traveling all the way from New York City, we wanted to maximize the experience. Six years and two kids later, we decided we could be away from Nashville for a maximum of one week during this second visit and that we wanted the trip to truly feel like a vacation — that meant minimal driving, staying in just one room and filling our days with incredible golf and the restorative powers of nature. Tara.