GEOCACHING – I finally join the secret society

It's somewhere over there...

Shh – don’t tell the muggles! I found one! A geocache…right there, approximately where the website said it would be. All I had to do was to take my bike on a 40km ride, wheel it down a muddy track where nobody goes, apart from birdwatchers and mosquitoes , look around for a few minutes, reach my hand into a promising spot, brush away the red-back spider webs and there it was – my first geocache!

No, of course I’m not telling you where. You’ll have to find your own one. There are more than 1.2 million of them out there somewhere, as you can see if you look at the geocaching website. www.geocaching.com

All I can say is that using my GPS was not all that important. In fact, the co-ordinates on the website and the co-ordinates on my GPS gave readings at least 10 metres apart, leaving me a reasonably large area to search in. Having found it, I spent a minute or two running down the list of people who found it before. There were about thirty of them, the most recent one a month ago. I wanted to add my name to the list of jubilant finders, but I couldn’t. Next time I’ll take a pen with me.

GEOCACHING – what am I doing wrong?

We are loo-king for your ge-o-cache.

A few weeks ago, my friends found a geocache. It was hidden in a tree, in a forest near the buddhist monastery at Thyangbochhe, Nepal, nearly 4000metres above sea level, with Mt Everest in the background. It seemed an impossible task, but they found it anyway. I was there and I was most impressed.

But yesterday I failed to find the geocache reputed to lurk at plain old Petersham Oval, Sydney. What am I doing wrong? Somebody help me, please! I want to find a geocache!! Everybody else is finding geocaches – why can’t I???