Top 30 Golf Courses of Indonesia 2017
Top 30 Golf Courses of Indonesia 2017
We expand our Indonesian national listings by 50% then re-rank the chart
This is the fifth time we’ve updated our Indonesia chart since we inaugurated our listings for the country in 2009 and, for the third consecutive revision, the top three places stay the same.
When we last reviewed the standings for this Southeast Asian nation, we said it would “take something special to dislodge Greg Norman’s Nirwana Bali, Jack Nicklaus’s Taman Dayu and Gary Player’s Ria Bintan (Ocean) courses from the top spots in the Indonesia table” and that statement still holds true because those three tracks remain firmly entrenched in the first three positions.
Another Nicklaus design, the Bumi Serpong Damai course at Damai Indah Golf makes an impressive four place leap up the chart to number 4. Considering this 18-hole layout had taken a bit of a tumble from number 6 to 8 last time around, there’s been a very smart turnaround in fortunes for a course that was unveiled in 1992 as the Golden Bear’s first Indonesian project.
Another two courses make significant upward moves within the new chart. The first of these is Robert Trent Jones Jnr’s accomplished Pondok Indah layout (up seven to number 9), which is probably best known for hosting the World Cup of Golf in 1983. It’s recently undergone an extensive renovation, a measure that has no doubt gone a long way to rejuvenating its ranking fortunes.
The other course to make a similar positive advance is Merapi Golf Yogyakarta (up five to number 14), a Thomsom, Wolveridge and Perrett mid-1990s design that’s located less than ten kilometres from the summit of Mount Merapi, an active stratovolcano that has erupted several times since the start of the new millennium.
Only two other courses climb up the standings and they are Rancayama (up two to 8), an early 1990s Ted Robinson Jnr layout and a debutant in our last chart, and Jagorawi (New) (up one to 10), where Thomson, Wolveridge and Perret set out this testing 18-hole course as one component of a very challenging 45-hole golf complex.
We’ve also expanded our new Indonesian listings by 50% so there are ten new entries in our new Top 30, headed at number 13 by the Forest & Mountain nines at Rainbow Hills, a mid-1990s Bob Moore layout from JMP Design. Such is the quality of the par five 13th hole on this course, it’s been included in the Golf Magazine book The 500 World’s Greatest Golf Holes.
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To view further details of the Top 30 Golf Courses of Indonesia click the link.
We’re always interested to know what you make of our re-ranked national listings so if you’d like to contact us with any comments regarding our newly enlarged Indonesian Top 30 then by all means click the “Respond to this article” link at the top or at the bottom of this page to give us your thoughts.
Jim McCann
Editor
Top 100 Golf Courses