Saturday, October 5, 2013

Cape Town Map

I have professional training as a navigator.  My first US Navy commissioned job was as assistant navigator of the USS Sellers.  After this I went to Naval Flight Officer School, became an NFO and then was sent to Advanced Navigation School in Corpus Christi, TX.

I then spent the first of my three years in a Naval Aviation Squadron, as a navigator for numerous crossings of the North Atlantic Ocean.  That training, those experiences, and my mental processes favor navigation.  I have spent a lot of time roaming the mountains of North Georgia, Montana, and New York, and lots of time tramping through the woods of Alabama.  I say all that to say that I have experience with maps and with navigation.

Let me say, Cape Town is the most confusing city to navigate that i have encountered in travels in almost 50 countries.  We were kindly loaned two very nice maps by South Africans expats living here in Gabs.  We also had a loaned GPS which was a life saver.

Our lodgings were due south of the central business district  (CBD) of Cape Town. We were well located central to lots of tourist destinations.  The Cape Town map should have been great.  Unfortunately on one side the map covered so much territory that details like major road lablels were ommitted. 

No problem, the back side of the map should have details just for Cape Town.  Well the back side map had lots of detail, but only for the CBD.  Getting TO the CBD, we were on our own, relying on the good old GPS.

We drove around for 5 solid days, and I never got the hang of the city layout.  I thought I had it a couple of times, only to find out I was backwards.  We made it everywhere we tried to go, but it wasn't easy.

There may be some lessons here:
  • You can give too little detail to be useful.
  • You can give plenty of detail about too small an area.
  • Without a map, there is never a sense of orientation.
We need to keep that in mind as we work with others.  Too much, too little, the lack of a mental framework, all hamper the process of orientation.

"A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver."  Prov 25:11.

True enough.

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