When Ronel De Bruto, the clubhouse manager at the Skukuza Golf Course in South Africa, says "Players here don't just concentrate on their golf game, they pay attention to the natural world around them," she isn't bragging that golfers at Skukuza somehow have a more enlightened, smell-the-roses attitude toward golf than players elsewhere. She is merely stating the obvious: golfers at Skukuza hope to survive their round.

The unfenced nine-hole course at Skukuza sits smack in the middle of the 19,000 square kilometer Kruger National Park, home to all of the big five (lions, elephants, leopards, rhinoceroses and Cape buffaloes), plus innumerable other alarming creatures like warthogs and poisonous puff adder snakes. Built in the early 1970s to give permanent residents of the small Skukuza restcamp community a little R&R, the course soon proved popular to safari-going park visitors eager to spice up their golf games.