Treasure Hunting for the Technological Age - News Article Locations on Waymarking.com

When I was invited to go geocaching I was puzzled. I tried splitting the word up to gain some sort of insight but the result was “geography” and “cache” which left me mind- boggled.

Arriving at the venue, the small mining town of Cullinan, east of Pretoria, I was surprised to see the number of people who knew of the day’s event. There must have been about 30 teams of more than three people each. One team arrived in T-shirts that read “I’m Not Lost, Just Geocaching”. I, on the other hand, was not geocaching, just lost, and the book they gave us did not help much. I felt like I was in a history class with a topic I had never heard of before.

And the fact that I was not GPS-savvy did not make the morning any easier. I watched as the geocaching gurus whipped out GPSs of all sorts. Some had maps and laptops and urgently discussed strategy. At this point I realised that I risked being the most stupid geocacher ever to take part in the event, so I approached my more knowledgeable team members for help.

Photographer Daniel Born, who had competed and come in the top five a few times, described it as “a sport that involves using expensive technology to find valueless containers [caches] hidden all around the world”.

In this case, our world was Cullinan, where the world’s largest diamond was discovered in 1905, and the surrounding areas.

“All you need to participate in the sport is a GPS, some cheap trinkets and a sense of adventure,” said Daniel. “The aim of the game is to plug co-ordinates into your GPS unit and follow the small arrow to the spot indicated. When you’re at ground zero, you start scratching around for the loot. It’s basically an adult treasure hunt.”

This made me think of The Amazing Race, my favourite reality show, and suddenly I couldn’t wait to start.

We discussed that, on the count of three, we would run to the car. Del and Russell would go around to the right-hand side of the car. Russell would jump into the driver’s seat and start the ignition. Daniel and I would run to the left and I would slide into the middle of the back seat while he threw himself into the car, closing the door s quickly as possible. Dylan, the trained orienteer, would hop into the front seat and operate Bela, our GPS.

I was excited when the teams were set off, at car rally- style intervals to spread the field. We were off at a scary pace.

Bela appeared to be the only one who maintained a calm voice. “In 500m arrive at your destination on the left,” she announced shortly before we reached our first geocache.

Driving at a speed I won’t divulge, our Peugeot 306 came to a screeching halt two seconds later and we back-seat occupants jumped out in search of the first container. This was the moment of truth, and in the middle of asking what we were looking for, I found a film container stuck magnetically to the underside of a metal street sign.

My team was delighted with me and I was loving my latest hobby. But there was more.

Once the geocache had been retrieved from its sneaky hiding spot, the log book we’d received when we arrived and a piece of paper in the cache, had to be signed with the team’s name to prove the visit.

That’s how the next four hours were to go for team TGF . But the competition was stiff, with teams such as The Woodies and NotBlond trailing closely behind us.

There were caches that could be retrieved only by Dylan and Daniel due to their fitness levels. Racing up a 300m hill was not for Del, Russell and I, although we attempted the bush, which left us covered in black jacks and other prickly plants I never knew existed.

Once at our cache destinations, we were able to find the treasures easily, except for two where other teams got there before us.

The toughest cache was tiny, a container smaller than a thimble. Bela had announced our arrival at the disused farm stall and we set about looking. We were sure we left no stone unturned and two other teams joined the search — in vain. We resorted to using the help line, which lost us points.

But when the time was up and the teams’ scores were tallied, we were thrilled to discover that we were the winners.

- © Nomfundo Xulu, The Times ©

Type of publication: Newspaper When was the article reported?: 03/11/2008 Publication: The Times Article Url: [Web Link] Is Registration Required?: no How widespread was the article reported?: national News Category: Entertainment

Visit Instructions:
Give the date of your visit at the news location along with a description of what you learned or experienced.

Recent Visits/Logs:

Date Logged Log User Rating   01/22/2012 Tartan_Terror visited it 05/23/2008 Carbon Hunter visited it 03/01/2008 Fish Eagle visited it 03/01/2008 4x4Maniac visited it

View all visits/logs