geocaching 101: spending hours looking for sh*** for no real reason

So after the comments on the last post, I figured I'd write a little bit about the 'sport' that I love so so much! The title is what a friend of mine calls geocaching - she's really not a fan!

Basically, geocaching is treasure hunting. People hide little containers all over the world and then publish the GPS coordinates online. Then other people (like me) download the coordinates and go looking for them. Simple enough really! Here is a picture of our first ever geocache, complete with our mascot, Elvis the travelling penguin!

There are some slightly more complicated twists to it: there are contests where teams race each other to find a certain number of caches in an area. There are different-sized caches, from tiny magnetised boxes or boxes that can fit half a pencil and a piece of paper (you sign a logbook to prove you were there) to huge - the biggest I've found so far was probably big enough to hold two loaves of bread quite comfortably. They're usually in Tupperware containers or jars, but some are in old ammo boxes, which completely flummoxed me the first time when I was halfway up a mud-bank, under a tree, trying to look inconspicuous while trying to figure out how on earth to open the thing!

Believe it or not, there is a geocache in this picture!

That's another fun thing- a lot of the caches are in places where there are a lot of non-geocachers (referred to as 'muggles') and the whole point is to avoid them seeing what you're doing, so you have to do all kinds of things, from trying to explain to security guards that you aren't a terrorist (in the UK a lot of caches are labelled with "THIS IS NOT A BOMB!!!"), to trying to walk casually past an area while scraping rocks out of the way, to creating strategic disturbances to hunt in an area without being spotted. My particular skill has aways been getting into restricted areas by being polite to security guards. That and organising geocaching trips by sorting through sites and listing them by distance and direction from point A as well as complexity, ideas, hints and any other information I might have.

Some geocaches are called 'multicaches' these can be very rewarding but also pretty nasty. I don't look for them often. They involve solving clues along the way to get the final coordinates, either by finding clues hidden along the way or by getting information from sign-posts or something and then solving riddles. We tried looking for one once, which resulted in Luke and I taking a swim in a lagoon and ultimately finding out that the cache had been hidden UNDERWATER and had been washed away in recent storms. This is where we ended up swimming:

There are also things called 'Travel-Bugs" which are basically bar-coded items that get moved from cache to cache and logged on the website. Some have tasks (like going from Africa to Asia or going from island to island) and some just kin of float around. You can track them online, which is always fun if you get one and then you can see where it's been.

Ok, so now that the admin side is done, let me tell you some of the reasons that make it awesome:

Because we all love a treasure hunt!

It's a lot like being a kid again, solving riddles, planning adventures and hunting around for things. They can be buried, hidden under/on/in things, up trees, under water you name it! A commercial GPS has an accuracy of up to about 3 metres or so, less if it's really cloudy or you're under a lot of trees, so it usually involves searching quite a bit (considering that your GPS leads you to within 3m of where the first person saved the coordinates and then there's still a good 3m to play with. In a forest, that's a LOT!

The feeling of adventure

Trying to look inconspicuous while following an arrow on a huge brightly coloured GPS is always a challenge, I've had several occasions where I've had to pretend it's a phone and had a conversation with it, while holding thumbs that my real phone won't ring! Pretending to take photos while trying to find a casual way to look under a park bench for a magnetic cache container, telling a security guard that you're visiting 'Steve' in number 58...

Or hunting around in this graveyard, feeling a bit guilty...

Having a purpose

Maybe it's just that I finished school a year younger than everyone else and I rushed through University skipping masters along the way but I find it hard to spend time being purposeless. If I go hiking I take pictures or try to walk faster than other people or just plain do something other than walk for the sake of walking. Geocaching means that you're looking for something, so I find it easier to relax, particularly when I go away and the lack of work makes me feel guilty.

Finding new places

People often put geocaches along routes that aren't well known, I guess as a weird publicity type thing. So if you're going somewhere and you don't want to stick to the tourist route, it's a great way of getting to the local 'gems' that aren't necessarily published in the guide books. When I was in Jersey (the island) last year I spent the most amazing afternoon hiking about 10 miles along beautiful cliff paths (I had to run the last bit because there was only one bus scheduled for the rest of the day, and then I got there an hour earlier and spent a lot of time on a bench, appreciating the beauty of Bon Nuit Bay and helping a passing motorist rescue a duckling from the middle of the road). Anyway it was probably my favourite day of the whole trip, I got to see a lot of beautiful scenery, find places and appreciate their history as I'd read about it when I found the coordinates. A bit better than spending a day making pottery or visiting yet another gift shop.

This was the view from a firing range (it had lots of danger signs, very exciting!)

This was at a sand-castle exhibition, which was absolutely incredible! There were dozens of sculptures like this one, this one was about my height and about 3 metres in diameter, with every detail absolutely perfect, even the tiny trees and windows that were literally smaller than my smallest fingernail!

Collecting random stuff

If the geocache is bigger than the tiny micro-containers they're filled with random knick-knacks. The usual protocol is to take something out and out something in when you find it. Some people get VERY enthusiastic and have personalised items or stickers or whatever, I take a pocketful of stuff with me in case I want to keep something, otherwise I just swap stuff between caches. When I was in Jersey I actually took took things home (I had taken a TON of stuff to leave in caches) and gave them as gifts to my family, complete with photos of the area I found them and a description of the area and any adventures I had while finding them. I figured that was a much better gift than yet another postcard or keyring. Some of the cooler stuff I've found in geocaches: Yugoslavian money, a complete incense set, a 40 koki-pen and crayon kit (it was in the mega huge cache), key rings of all shapes and colours and sizes - most of which have been moved to other caches, several compasses, photo-frames, Brazilian money...

Finding caches in the places you pass every day

I love the idea of a secret parallel world. Kind of Harry-Potterish I guess, but the idea that these things are all over and nobody knows it and I've been 'let in' on the secret thrills me! Maybe it all goes back to my childhood when we all wanted to know the secrets while stopping anyone else from finding out? About a year go I had a really bad day, plugged my home coordinates into the website and found about four geocaches in an afternoon, all within about a 10km radius of where I work! Two of them are within walking distance, and I've driven past them at least one a week for the past few years without knowing! And now I get to drive past them and grin to myself because I know the secret! Of course the flip-side is that you have to poke around a lot to find things - which is quite often a bad idea in the city, and so the first order of business is usually to find a decent stick before you discover that you've been searching in the 'toilet area' of the local vagrants, or (and Candice discovered) at the site of a rendezvous that ended in her holding up a used condom, looking puzzled, dropping it and shrieking!

This is a dog-walking route around a reservoir! I wouldn't have found it without the hunt for a geocache, and it was one of best walks I've ever had, it was really beautiful and peaceful!

Wow, this has become a HUGE post, my apologies! I'll see if I can find some other photos to illustrate my points. My apologies for the limited range, I'm usually the one up a tree looking for things, not sitting sedately with a camera!

I guess this could be a new section: fun for the family! I took this photo while hunting on the cliff for a geocache with my Dad. Having geocaches to look for made my trip to visit him awesome, and it gave us something to do together other than the usual sight-seeing! He was amazingly patient with me hunting around, although he also liked to wait until I was in a particularly ungraceful position to take photos... (so is that where I get it from?)

I climbed this tree in the hunt for a cache. It turned out it was in a different tree, across the road... and at about shoulder height!

I took this after climbing the mud bank to find the very tricky ammo box!

The adventures over the weekend

Once again fate struck and a whole ton of awesome stuff happened over the weekend and before I got a chance to write about it, other stuff happened. And once again I found myself promising to go back and tell the stories and the chance kind of slipped away...

So I'm going to write about it now! Photos to follow as soon as I beg Leia to let me post pictures of her...

So anyway as you may know, Leia is a labmate. She's a masters student working on mice. We have a long history, all starting when we were kids and our parents used to sit inside and chat while a whole troop of kids played nicely outside. Well on one such occasion I was stuck with a bunch of boys (Leia would have been a baby being cooed over inside at this stage) so I had brought my 'My Little Pony' collection out and was constructing a quite scary scenario in the sandpit involving giant horses against little green plastic soldiers. My collection consisted of three ponies, a purple one a yellow one and a blue one. I think I still have them somewhere.

One of the boys took one of my ponies (the blue one) and pulled its tail out! I was devastated as I'm pretty sure it had been on an aquatic adventure at some point and didn't smell nice like the others anymore and so all it really had going for it was its tail. One of the other boys was angry on my behalf and beat up the nasty child (who went on to be head boy of his primary school...). This was Leia's brother. And that is my history with their family!

For the record, Leia's parents are not crazy Star Wars geeks or anything like that, it's not her real name, any more than my real name is "Brother T" even though Luke's been calling me that for years (and I'm still not quite sure why). We renamed her when she arrived in the lab with a giant pair of noise-cancelling headphones that resembled the famous 'Chelsea bun' style made so famous in the first star wars movie. I even labelled her headphones 'Leifyers' when I got an awesome label-maker from the lab cleanup upstairs.

So anyway on Friday evening, while having amazing hot chocolate with the IT guy we decided that I would go with her to her field site on Saturday afternoon so that we could both take out big scary SLRs along and spend some time taking photos.

I had Saturday morning off to help my brother on a photo-shoot which was amazing. The people were very cool, and one of them in particular really made me think about how I see the world. And so on Saturday we went to her site which is basically a field of super-tall grass. We went in search of trees to find that they were all fenced OUT of the property, so we ended up lying on the grass taking photos of power-lines, grass, trees from a distance, blackjacks... it was actually quite fun!

The next morning I went along again, this time with a bundle of geocache information and we caught a mouse which was very exciting and headed off in search of geocaches. This was more for my benefit - I picked up a travel bug on the last excursion with full intent to drop it at the next cache. Problem being we didn't find anything else that day and I haven't been geocaching since. Travel Bugs are pretty expensive and I felt guilty having it sitting on my desk rather than floating around the world having adventures, so I was determined to get rid of the thing!

we found a cache really nearby in a specific tree (it was huge and right in front of it,and when I pointed it out she went "Where? I don't see it? Where?) but it was tiny and so the silly thing didn't fit in it and I had to keep the bug until the next site. After much exploring and not getting
anywhere close we decided to head back, stopping along the way at a place that I used to go to often as a child that a) has a geocache nearby and b) I remembered their meringues as being incredible and wanted to see if they still were.

Anyway, long story short, after accidentally invading a staff village, nearly climbing a fence and ending up falling in a river and making friends with a local dog but not so much with the rather dodgy owner who zoomed off on a creaking KTM (it wasn't in bad shape either, but there are certain people who shouldn't get sport bikes) we ended up quite far from the meringue place at a paintball course!

Leia REALLY needed the bathroom by then. I think she'd been needing to go all day, and we'd had coffee while she disinfected her car by accident which didn't help, so after taking laminated flyers for wooden decking and panelling from a car guard she went in search of a bathroom to find that they were BOTH labelled 'Men Only' and the only alternative was a portaloo. She refused the portaloo option and I didn't really want to go in because there was a bike there that very possibly might have belonged ton someone I didn't want to see while being covered in trapping grime, having a bad hair day and just... I didn't want to handle it on a weekend that had
been pretty good thus far.

So she decided to tough it out and so we went off in search of the elusive geocache. I taught her the best trick of geocaching - the 'walk-with-a-purpose-so-that-nobody-asks-any-questions' trick - and we went on until we realised that we'd have to hop a fence INTO the paintball course. For the record, the course is basically a forest with the odd hay bale tossed in, it looks AWESOME and we have to play there one day! The cache was about 80 metres away, I couldn't see any paintballers and the shots sounded relatively far, so I figured we would run for it. Leia kindly obliged and so we went sprinting through the trees until we got to the spot and couldn't find the thing.

By this stage Leia was jumping up and down and spinning in circles and trying to ignore the sound of rushing water from the river nearby. I didn't want to give up (do I ever?) partly because I'd picked up a SECOND travel bug at the previous site and really wanted to get rid of both of them (I had a reason for taking it)! so I said that we'd do one more sweep and then head back. She gave a tense nod and carried on dancing from foot to foot.

I was almost at giving-up point when I leaned down, poked with my toe and realised that they'd BURIED the thing, so I looked up to say we'd found it to see her walking away very briskly. I figured that as she had mentioned her preference to a bush over a portaloo it might be best to avoid following her and so I put the travelbugs in, grabbed a yoyo and a magic bean thingie and signed off on our visit. In the meantime Leia had very kindly sent me a message to say she was taking the portaloo of horror option and so I headed back to find her trying to shower in waterless hand sanitiser in the parking lot.

For the record, the meringues are still amazing.

I'm typing this at the desk I've appropriated in Luke's lab. I started spending a few hours a day here, then full days once Luke had arrived... About a week ago Is tarted working late, staying in the lab after Luke had left. Today is the first time I've been here before him and let myself in with the spare key from someone n the lab across the passage... I feel kind of guilty, I hate people going anywhere near my stuff if I''m not around, but I just couldn't face the idea of a)stairs and b)my lab-mate upstairs...

All credit to Luke for actually being nice about the whole situation, and for letting me stay here. I would have kicked me out a LONG time ago!

So my weekend had a quiet start, I had computer trouble on Friday and so ended up staying at university until 8:30 or so - not late for a normal day, but pretty late fr me on a Friday. On Saturday after a horribly hectic morning (which extended about an hour further into the afternoon than it was supposed to) I dashed home and had lunch at super-speed before dashing off to meet Candice and a couple of her friends for an afternoon of geocaching. I haven't been geocaching since I left the field in November, and I haven't done a serious geocaching expedition in rather a lot longer, so I decided to put exhaustion aside and go for it! It was also a good opportunity to take my new camera out. As it was my first serious attempt at photography with the scary new SLR, the photos are pretty terrible, and I battled a lot at first (I realised once I'd got home that I'd set it on one thing while I thoughts I'd set it on something else... but for a first try it wasn't too bad, and at least I know that some of the skills I've learned from other cameras do carry across, so now it's just a matter of getting to know my way around the controls quickly and then a lot of practice!

Geocaching was interesting... I'm not usually a fan of geocaching in the city, besides having to hide from normal people while you're hunting, I have also learned the trick of poking around with a stick rather than your hands n order to avoid some of the more charming things you can find in the undergrowth around here. The caches Candice had picked out were actually pretty nice to find, although we only found two in the afternoon, we didn't end up covered in mysterious muck or having to explain ourselves to security guards (like last time). The sole unpleasant part physically was that I was COATED in blackjacks at the first site, but considering that I rock-hopped across a really disgusting waterfall and made a concerted effort to climb a tree in really unsuitable shoes, I think we did well!

After that I went home and had a nasty dilemma of having to choose between working for Lara on Sunday (and thus giving her an extra day on her holiday in the Drakensburg) or going to Chief Goth's house for a braai. I decided to be a good person and worked, which I regretted a lot as it turned out I was working with Laurin (of the spastic colon) who was acting as annoyingly as always, with the added bonus of being on energy pills or something. It was like working with an insanely hyperactive talking machine with the volume UP. Fortunately her boyfried came to visit and they went outside to chat, so I had a little bit of a respite, but as she keeps getting in trouble for spending half her shifts ouotside with said boyfriend, every time anyone came near the counter or the phone rang she came screeching back in, usually yelling about something she thought was funny or imitating dumb comedy shows she's been watching over and over and over... I never thought I'd be the type to share exasperated looks with customers, but after 5 hours, we were all sighing and rolling eyes at what she considered to be her charming antics.

After that I rushed across to Chief Goth's house to join in for the tail end of the braai. It turned out it had been rained out, but she, a friend I'd met before and her brother were there, so I neded up staying until almost midnight, playing guitar hero. It was a lot of fun, but of course monday arrived, and now I am completely exausted!

To make things worse, I went to the zoo this morning. Luke was showing the new honours student around and I tagged along and took the opportunity to go say hi to Thandi. She was really sweet and she remembered me and it was awesome, but she also crapped on my back and smeared it ito my hair, so I had to wash it all out in the bathroom and now my shirt has a huge wet patch over the shoulder. It was worth it to see the little fuzzy monster again!

aaaah! aaah!

So after much running around with these stupid funding applications, I decided to go geocaching on my way home yesterday. It was a nice 30 minute detour, with a lovely view, and although it might not be the nicest area, I was able to park my car, run and get it and get back to my car in less than 2 minutes!

Last night Luke and I went off to have dinner at the house of one of our numerous zoo-staff friends, where we learned how to eat, drink and chat while fending off Thandi, the baby mandril. It was fun, even if it got really cold while we were saying goodbye and Luke wouldn't stop talking so Elaine and I had to share a scarf and hop around in little circles to keep warm!

This morning it was up early to collect my mother from the airport. I left super-early, way before there should have been traffic, and proceeded to get stuck in traffic, where it took me an hour to go 10 km and eventually took me 2 hours to get to the airport. I used some of my stylish back-route knowledge and got us home in just over an hour, after detouring through some of the most wonderfully dodgy (and yet somehow kitsch at the same time) areas of Kempton Park.

So now I'm trying desperately to finalise my funding applications before I have to go off home to pack for my flight this evening, except that I need things from people to finish and they're not helping by not being here, or not answering email, so I'm afraid Luke is going to be PAing for me while I'm away.. (yay! thanks! :) )

Anyway I was talking to my mom between fits of road rage this morning, and I realised that I know more about Jersey than she does, and she just went there! I guess that's the awesome thing about geocaching, I know about all these random locations where there are caches, so I can get a totally more awesome experiece! Plus, with my pretty awful sense of direction, I get to have a GPS with me so geftting lost is slightly harder, plus I've also been looking at maps and stuff a lto, so I have a general and very vague idea of where stuff is on the island.

The sad thing is that I will probably see very little of Jersey in the 5 days taht I'm there, as I'm scheduled to go and meet with the zoo people on my first day, and if it goes well I'll probably live in the zoo for most of my stay. Zoos have a way of doing that to you!