Geocaching

My blog would not be complete without some discussion of geocaching. Crudely put, geocaching is the sport of high-tech treasure hunting. The geocaching website lists the coordinates of caches hidden at spots all over the world. You enter the coords into a GPS (Global Positioning System - satellite navigation) receiver and go off to find the hidden treasure. The treasure works on a trust-based exchange system: you can take some treasure from the cache, and replace it with some of your own treasure (usually small knick-knacks or children's toys). Or, as someone else described it: "Yep, I use multibillion-dollar satellite technology to find Tupperware hidden in the woods"!

Today is a good day from a geocaching perspective, as I had my first FTF (First To Find), i.e. I was the first person (together with Cabey) to find a brand new cache that had just been hidden. Theo (Cabey's dad) discovered that a new cache had been hidden near to where they stay in Pretoria (and where I am on holiday at the moment) and sent Cabey and I off before breakfast to get the FTF!

The subject of geocaching is not totally off the topic of this blog, as it is a great way of exploring new areas (and discovering things about well-known places that you never knew!). As such, I hope to do quite a bit of geocaching in the USA while there on sabbatical.

Another aspect of geocaching is travel bugs (or TBs). These are items that have a tracking number attached them, which are then moved from cache to cache by geocachers. As part of my sabbatical trip I hope to retrieve a TB that I released into the wild in an Eastern Cape cache in November 2007. This "Proudly South African" TB's mission is to meet me in the USA during my sabbatical.

You can find out more at the website: www.geocaching.com; follow my geocaching exploits as Alien3Inc; or watch my TB's progress.