Chi Linh Star Golf: Northern Vietnam's Best-Kept Championship Secret

Gunnar Kobin

Mar 24

5 min read

Updated: Oct 22

Most golfers who come to Vietnam go to Da Nang. The central coast gets the publicity, the awards and the travel lists. Which means Chi Linh Star Golf and Country Club, sitting quietly in the hills of Hai Duong Province two hours east of Hanoi, gets missed by a lot of people who would enjoy it.

Their loss.

The drive is part of the day. Hanoi falls away quickly and you are in proper northern Vietnamese countryside. In the growing season the rice fields on both sides are a vivid green. In among them are earth mounds, the graves of earlier generations of the farming families, buried close to where they lived and worked. It is an unusual thing to see from a car window. It is also dignified, and it stayed with me for the rest of the drive.

Chi Linh itself is a working town, not a resort, and nobody will mistake it for one. The odd thing is that it has a big golf course right in the middle of it. The two-hour drive is what keeps the weekend crowds away, so the course is a lot quieter than the ones closer to Hanoi. What you get instead is birdsong and no city noise at all. That alone is worth the two hours in the car.

A bit of history. Chi Linh was designed by Independent Golf Course Services, an Australian firm, and opened in 2003. A year later it hosted the first professional golf tournament in northern Vietnam. There are 27 holes in three loops, A, B and C, spread over 324 hectares of forested valley. You can see the quality of the original construction: championship width, big changes in height, and plenty of holes where water is properly in play. A large central lake dominates the property and keeps demanding your attention all round.

I played loops A and C and had a great time. But my advice is simple: if you are driving two hours each way, play all three. Skipping B is like reading two-thirds of a book. Do not be the person on the way back to Hanoi wondering what the other nine were like.

OK, the actual golf.

It is hilly. Genuinely, surprisingly hilly, in a way nothing else in northern Vietnam prepares you for. The clubhouse sits at the highest point of the property, and from up there you can see all of it: fairways, streams, trees and a lot of water.

Forest surrounds the whole course. In the bird season it is loud with them, and there are moments when the mowed fairway is the only sign anyone has been there before you. It reminded me that golf in the right setting is as much about where you are as about the score.

Water is the main hazard. The central lake spreads out into bays that hug the edges of most fairways. The island greens can only be reached by taking on the carry. Several holes have water across the fairway with no way to lay back. You either make the shot or you are wet. That risk-reward idea runs through the whole course.

The detail I liked most was the rock. On a number of holes the granite mountainside is exposed, with rock faces looking down on the fairways and untidy wild ground between the trees. It has nothing to do with Southeast Asian resort golf. It looked Finnish to me. If you have played in Finland or the Baltics, you will recognise it at once. Rock, forest, water, silence.

By championship standards the fairways are reasonably wide, in places very wide, so it is playable for mid-handicappers while still giving plenty of trouble to anyone who strays. The greens run fast and true. No complaints there.

My own round, in March 2026 off the blue tees, was the Lake loop (C) and the Hill Side loop (A). I shot 82: 42 on the Lake nine and 40 on the Hill Side.

The Lake nine started with a bogey on the par 5 and had one proper blemish, a 6 on the par-4 sixth. Otherwise it was bogeys and pars, including a par on the short fourth. Nothing heroic, nothing tragic.

The Hill Side nine was better. Par, par to start, then a 6 on the third hole of the loop, a par 4, which undid that good start fairly efficiently. After a couple of bogeys I closed the loop with four straight pars, which is about as good as my golf gets and a nice way to walk up to a clubhouse on top of a hill. No birdies all day. On a course with this much water, I will take it.

Some practicalities. There is no GPS on the buggies. You have three options: use your own device, trust your caddie completely, or guess. On a course this hilly, with this many water carries, exact yardages matter. The difference between a committed swing and a tentative one is often the difference between wet and dry. The caddies are helpful and know the course, but a pocket rangefinder is worth bringing and removes the doubt.

The clubhouse. Worn is the only word for it. It has been there since 2003 and looks it. The locker rooms are dated, the facilities are basic, and the building has carried two decades without any serious renovation. It works, but it will not impress anyone arriving for the first time. This is one of those places where the golf course is clearly far better than everything around it. It deserves better, and I hope it gets it one day.

None of that is a reason to stay away. The golf is very good. The valley setting is unlike anything else you will play in northern Vietnam. And a couple of hours through rice paddies and villages to a quiet, hilly, bird-filled championship course makes for a golf day very different from the manicured resort courses further south.

Final word.

Should you play it? Yes. Chi Linh does not need to compete with Da Nang. It offers something different: a working landscape on the way in, a forest you can actually hear, and 27 holes of serious golf that most visitors to Vietnam never find. It is a very good layout with a tired clubhouse two hours from Hanoi, and it is worth the trip.

If you are in northern Vietnam and you play golf, go. Take a rangefinder, leave early to beat the traffic, and play all 27. Make a day of it.