Even Tiger Woods might have seen this as an Instagram opportunity. Taking a putt on a green dusted with occasional spots of icing-sugar white sand, a back-drop of wind-swept palm trees and blue ocean luminescence. This is golf, on Egypt’s Red Sea Riviera, a coastline running parallel with the coral reef for 1,240 miles. Home to over 1,200 species and numerous lost golf balls.

I was playing the Cascades Championship Golf Course, at Soma Bay, home to the annual Egyptian Championship. The blindingly white terrain, arid and desolate, seems more apt for a remake of Lawrence of Arabia than golf. Then, like a biblical miracle, a verdant oasis of golf appears alongside a sea that is a colour chart of maritime possibility: infinite shades of aquamarines, cobalts, turquoises and deep royal blues.

Often referred to at The Treasure of the Red Sea, the course was designed by the South African grandmaster Gary Player. Inevitably, after Player had experienced the world’s greatest courses, there are echoes, motifs and name-checks to the world’s great courses. Soma’s Pebbles, the fifth and the course’s signature hole, is a reverent nod to California’s majestic Pebble Beach. It is a Par 3 that juts out onto a promontory into the Red Sea, challenging golfers to hit across a blue void onto a neurotically thin peninsula.

As waterfalls cascade down from the hotel towards the 9th and 18th fairways – that’s where the name comes from – there’s a touch of Augusta to the colourful landscaping. A backdrop of the rugged Red Sea Mountains, with an aura of washed red as sunset approaches, provides achingly beautiful vistas.

But this is a Beauty and the Beast course. Take the schizophrenic second hole. If your ball is sitting proud on the spiky, almost plastic, korai grass, a sort of natural tee, it seems like an invitation to caress an iron onto a green which really isn’t too far away. But Player menacingly called this hole Bunker Alley: protected by bunker after bunker, as the fairway of this Stroke Index 1 hole narrows alarmingly.

Every one of the 614 yards of the Par 5 second hole, that’s from the back Championship tee, reminds you that this is a long course. A buggy is highly recommended to take you on the undulating, winding pink brick road between holes. Once you’ve driven away from the first tee you will see few other golfers unless you meet them at one of the gazebos strategically placed, mid-way through front nine and back nine, for drinks and refreshments.

“This is a link’s course. It is windy,” warns Major, the Cascades Championship Golf Course course manager who commands the fleet of golf buggies and army of groundsmen. His weather-beaten, olive-skinned complexion a testament to Somabay’s climate of warm winds. For much of the year blustery winds blow south, picking up golf balls in their squalls and depositing them with the parrot fish, triggerfish and stone fish. Sooty gulls and spoonbills hitch soaring lifts on the thermals. Major shrugs his shoulders as if to suggest that these winds are divine intervention, players should pack stoic acceptance in their golf bag alongside their sand wedge.

Professionals say that golf is a game that is played in the mind. Gary Player knew that when he designed the 12th. Capitalising on the psychological demons he named it, “Dilemma … Dilemma.”

As with life, you have choices. So often it is choice that defines our destiny. Player presents you with two fairways. Do you take the safer inland route to the left, though it is longer? Or do you gamble with the shorter route, to the right, running along the precipitous headland?

As with life, so often there is no right or wrong answer. Much depends on the winds of fortune. Somabay is so windy that it is one of the world’s top Kite Surfing destinations. Top kite surfers can reach 64 kmph. That’s windy. Day by day the dilemma changes.

It was part of Player’s philosophy that a course should be playable for amateurs as well as professionals. Even if some of the holes are testing there can be few more beautiful places on the planet to pencil in a double bogey on your scorecard.

The Cascades Golf Resort, Spa & Thalasso, Soma Bay