By John Bingham
If I weighed in at 60 tonnes I could manage little more than a lie on the sofa in front of daytime TV. But for the gigantic Southern Right whales off the coast of Cape Town, weighing the same as seven double-decker buses is no reason to avoid a spot of acrobatics.
Utterly unconcerned by the boatload of spectators kitted out in fetching orange oilskins, one repeatedly dived in and out of the water as another playfully balanced a piece of kelp on his nose.
Nearby a family of penguins swam nonchalantly past through the surf, apparently unflustered by the prospect of one of the world's largest populations of Great White sharks lurking beneath.
Gripping onto the safety rail of our boat, I felt like I had turned up in a David Attenborough documentary. But after just three days in South Africa I was getting used to nature showing off.
For all the pain of its recent history, this is an area blessed by nature - from the dramatic backdrop of Table Mountain looming over Cape Town to the jagged peaks and rolling landscape of the winelands just inland. It was the latter that I had really come to see.
In the years since the collapse of apartheid signalled the end of international economic isolation, South Africa's wine industry has taken off. The country is already the world's eighth largest producer and becoming a bigger and bigger presence on UK supermarket and off-licence shelves every year.
Not that I could claim any expertise in the subject. My golden rule with buying wine has always been to go for the second cheapest bottle in the shop. But there couldn't be better places to have a crash course in the subject than unpretentious South Africa.
Centred on a series of former Dutch colonial estates, complete with picture-postcard 17th century whitewashed buildings, the country's vineyards have as much of the Old World as the New about them.
The winelands' rich history is very much on show in towns like Stellenbosch or Franschhoek - Afrikaans for French corner - which takes its name from the Huguenot refugees who settled there 300 years ago, fleeing religious persecution in their homeland.
Like New Orleans, Franschhoek is something of an architectural tribute to old France, with pretty wrought-iron balconies and wooden shutters everywhere. And just as in France, good food is a serious business here.