THE Lowly Peon

Geocaching 
28 March 2010, 1:34am

Last weekend, daisy and I decided to have a little adventure before meeting up with a bunch of company folk for a colleague's farewell dinner. I woke up earlier than I otherwise would on a Sunday, rode a public bike to meet her at Broken Bridge, and we set off on our first Geocaching adventure.

Geocaching is a remarkably simple idea. Someone sets up a cache — a repository for a log book, maybe some stuff that other people have dropped off there — and posts information about it on geocaching.com. The amount of detail provided depends on the difficulty rating of the cache. A very difficult find, for example, may only have the geocoordinates and a small hint (which requires decoding, the same way you decoded the answer to the lame joke on the back of your favorite childhood cereal box).

So Daze and I knew the coordinates of this cache, and we knew that it was in Baoshi Mountain north of the lake in Hangzhou. We read a bit more, including several comments saying the coordinates were a bit skewed, and that it was 50m away from the path. The rest was just walking with my GPS unit, or iPhone (my iPhone's map is more detailed because I don't want to dish out $100 for a Chinese topo map when Google does it for free), until we got closer to the dot on the map.

It was a blast. It was really nothing more than a great hike through the mountains, but once we got within 100m or so, I got real excited and started going faster. Not sure if my heart was going faster from excitement or from sprinting up the stairs.

We had a bit of a hard time finding it, as the comments were right, and the coordinates were a bit skewed. But Daisy suggested going down a gnarly off-the-trail clearing, where it became obvious (nice work, Daze!).

It was a blast. I can't wait to go find some more. Hangzhou only has a small handful, but Seoul has hundreds, and I'll be there next week with maggie33! Woo!

You can see our hike here.

update
[28 March 2010, 7:35am]