Cape of Good Hope

I have had a real sense of departure while traveling to such places as Kathmandu, Tasmania, and Borneo. When I sighted a penguin on a beach near Cape Town, I knew I was far away from home. On the flight from Atlanta, the pilot said this was the longest commercial flight pattern on the planet. There were no icebergs in view and I later found that the Jackass penguins are native to South Africa. February is summertime in the Southern Hemisphere and true to form, these creatures were having fun.
My stopover on the way to Tanzania had a few objectives. The Cape of Good Hope is a sailor’s landmark and a must-see for me. There is turbulence at the extremities of continents that needs to be felt.
The source for Pinotage wine was close at hand and an area vineyard had great lodging on their estate. In my notes for the trip was the phone number for the uncle of my favored employee, a former South African who married a Peace Corp worker and now lived in USA. Our timing was good and the uncle was able to meet me at the vineyard restaurant for dinner that evening. I was no stranger to machinery but when this retired miner started talking about the equipment it takes to get to diamonds, I could only smile and shake my head. The specifics escape me now but he ran the rock cutting machinery that bored caverns miles underground. The magnitude of such endeavors is commensurate with the price of diamonds and gold. One of his many points given about extremes in this field was that there is a limit at which a cable can lower an elevator. To reach miles below the surface – the strength of the cable is determined by its diameter – the larger the diameter the more weight is added to the elevator load – any fixed diameter cable has a threshold – when it is reached or a point of no return where it is the weight of the cable, not the elevator that is the factor. Into our second bottle of wine, I felt as though we had mathematically disproved infinity.