Geocaching is the treasure hunting of the 21st century – something for adventurers and geeks alike that gets people away from computer screens and out into the world.
The idea is to find “treasure” hidden somewhere by a fellow geo-cacher. The “treasure” is usually a plastic container with a pencil and a log book for you to sign to prove your “find”.
There will also be small, completely worthless items of “treasure”, one of which you will remove. And according to tradition, you should always take along something small of your own to add to the treasure chest.
Geocaching is the treasure hunting of the 21st century – something for adventurers and geeks alike that gets people away from computer screens and out into the world.
The idea is to find “treasure” hidden somewhere by a fellow geo-cacher. The “treasure” is usually a plastic container with a pencil and a log book for you to sign to prove your “find”.
There will also be small, completely worthless items of “treasure”, one of which you will remove. And according to tradition, you should always take along something small of your own to add to the treasure chest.
It’s a kind of trading operation between you and other geo-cachers and you build up a kind of virtual community on the web as you swap news and boast about your finds and the places where you have made your own treasure deposit.
You get the coordinates from the geocaching website, punch them in on your GPS and off you go. Seems easy enough, but things can get tricky. Sometimes the terrain will be very difficult.
There’s a famous cache on a rocky outlet out to sea that can only be accessed by boat, for example. And then there’s the problem that some people are directionally and technologically challenged.
As a brand-new geocacher I chose what looked like an easy one to start with. Or so I thought.
It was easy enough to get one of my fellow reporters to accompany me – you can entice many people just by saying there is an adventure at stake. With the coordinates in the GPS device, thanks to someone more proficient in technology than me, we set off, guided by the monotonous tin voice of the GPS lady.
At first it went quite smoothly, except for minor heart attacks when the GPS informed me that the satellite signal had been lost. Then came the inevitable: the tin voice told me to turn right – but there was no road on the right; not tar, not gravel, just solid bush. She sounded more insistent by the second and a one-sided screaming match ensued in the car as we tried to work out what to do next.
We settled it by parking the car and exploring on foot. There was a hiking trail nearby, so we set off on our treasure hunt following this trail.
After a bit of unsuccessful bush diving in the direction indicated by the GPS, we decided to read the instructions a bit more carefully and figured out that we would have to turn back.
We found the first one (by sheer dumb luck) at the beginning of the trail, but there were three more caches further along on the trial.
Halfway through our search the GPS’s battery gave up – but we decided to power on with sort of an idea about where we were going and what we were looking for. As we found one more cache, the wind came up and we realised that the rest of the trail would be over sand dunes and on the beach. That’s when we gave up looking for the rest of the caches. The clouds were rolling in at an alarming speed and we could not outrun the rain. Wet, tired – and even a bit victorious, we found the car again and returned home.
Geocaching proved to be one heck of an adventure. Imagine how much more fun it would be if you had a sense of direction and batteries that worked.
