Cache in hand
Monday, October 3, 2011 at 12:12PM 
Kowloon Walled City Park, Kowloon, Hong Kong
A man stripped to the waist stretches up to the trees and unhooks a bamboo bird cage containing a few small fluttering splashes of colour. He adds it to two more in his other hand and strolls across the small plaza to some other trees, identical in every way, but shaded from the scorching sun. He reaches back up with the cages and re-hangs them.
An old woman sits on a low wall and begins loudly and rhythmically slapping her knees, gradually working down to her ankles.
Elsewhere a man laconically twists at the waist, half-heartedly attempting some Chi Kung before giving up and sitting in the shade. It's that hot.
From under a small pile of rocks, possibly some of the remains of the walled city, I casually extract a small plastic box, plonk it on the wall beside me and resume sipping from my bottle of water, as if I unearthed kitchenware from memorial parks all the time.
The box is a geocache, and I've got plans for it. I'm carrying a flower shaped keyring which I've brought from a similar plastic box hidden in a dissimilar tree in South London.
L'Isle de Citié, Paris, France
At the very point of the island, I'm strolling through a commemorative garden to the victims of the Holocaust, surrounded by a large group of people delicately working their way through a Tai Chi form. As I sidle towards the stone inscription, trying to read the two dates and subtract one from the other, a voice says: "Monsieur?"
Turning, I see a young man pulling on a lively fishing rod. He hauls up a respectably sized fish from the Seine, and after a moment's uncertainty about whether he is about to attempt to sell it to me, I realise he wants me to take a photo of him with his prize.
Later, I somewhat self-consciously climb some steps allowing me to reach the roof of a cafe, and slide out a plastic box from under the eaves.
Olympic Park, Sydney, Australia
I'm wandering about the deserted grounds of the Olympic Park, counting the legs on a monument here, finding the date on the bottom of a huge array of solar powered floodlights there. I'm wondering what the strange, distant noise is. Sounds a bit like the sea. Another wave of sound echoes distantly around, and I look towards the nearby stadium. Ah. That would be the sound of 10,000 people roaring their elation or disappointment at some sporting event. There's a match on.
I decide I'd better hurry up, and twenty-five minutes later I'm crouched half under a bridge by a riverbank, pulling out a cobwebby plastic box from the hollow where some power lines enter the ground, and only then remembering that Australia is home to eight of the world's ten most-deadly spiders. (Spoiler: I lived.) (Edit: Mis-remembering, I should say. It's only four out of ten, as far as google tells me. I feel so much better.)
My niece and I set off from her house with torches and giggles. A couple of weeks ago she introduced me to the strange art of geocaching. People hide boxes, and publish the GPS co-ordinates through the official website. Other people, like us, use a GPS device to help us find the boxes. Satnavs will do it, but more convenient still is the iPhone app.
It sounds too easy, but of course the devil - by which I mean the fun - is in the detail. GPS (at least on my iPhone) is only accurate to within a few metres. That's great for getting you close, but on a tree-lined path by a railway track in the suburbs, in the dark, that still leaves a fair bit of hunting to do. But there are hints, there are sometimes helpful photos. Occasionally there's a young woman who has already found the cache, and in those circumstances she'll provide assistance of the "hotter, hotter, colder" sort until, grinning and a little scratched you pluck a box from the crook of the tree's branches. (please note: my niece may not be near your cache, don't be disheartened.)
Sometimes co-ordinates don't lead straight to a cache. Many geocaches are lovingly created and elaborate treasure hunts, with multiple stages, called waypoints. At each waypoint you are guided to something which will generate a number (a year on a plaque, the values of the fourth and seventh letters on a sign, the number of letterboxes serving a Parisian flower market - anything!) These give you the co-ordinates of the next stage.
Often the creators of the caches work in some local history, offering background and context to the local features you're finding. It's a beautifully tangential way to learn about the place you're in. Even in my hometown there are hidden stories this hobby has shown me.
But, as Brad Pitt cried, "What's in the box?"
Depends. Caches can be utterly tiny - I've found several that are wee magnetic hollow cylinders the size of an earplug. These unscrew to reveal a tightly rolled strip of paper. The bare minimum for a cache to contain - a logbook, which you can sign, date and write a terse message on if you're so inclined, recording your finding it.
These "nanos" can be found stuck to municipal metal in all good towns. They're ideal for cities as they can be hidden pretty much anywhere. I've plucked these from park benches, road signs and even vents in sidestreets near Trafalgar square (to the sllght alarm and bemusement of my friend Jason, who then warned me that I'd just set off red flashing lights in a CCTV control room somewhere. So be it.) The armed police and bomb squad didn't descend on us that time, but the point is a good one - this pastime requires a bit of discretion. I'd counsel against anyone seeking to establish a cache in a railway station for example.
Beyond these tiny caches come a range of sizes. I've found old 35mm film canisters (under a fencepost by a graveyard, and ingeniously disguised as the hinge of a large wrought iron traffic light control box) and a variety of sizes of locking plastic boxes. There are even larger ones out their too.
As well as signing the logbook in the cache itself, you can log visits, upload photos and comment on the cache at the website.
Caches larger than an atom tend to include, besides their logbook, various amounts of "stuff".
Stuff consists of trinkets, mostly. Low value items for the main part, such as keyrings, pictures, postcards, buttons, shells, coins, lego figures and other small toys. The rule is that you can take something, but you should leave something of equal or greater value.
More interesting than these are trackables, travel bugs and geocoins. These are bought from the official geocaching site and take the form of either dogtags or a small coin or similar object. The important thing is that they have a unique code stamped onto them. The owners fill in a webpage for their trackables and give them a mission, usually and endearingly phrased from the point of view of the anthropomorphised trackable. Once they're briefed on their mission (and, presumably, once the smoke has cleared from that message self-destructing) the trackables are dropped off in a cache somewhere and the owners can follow their progress on the website.
A trackable's mission might be very open, like the flower I left in Hong Kong which just wanted to "...travel to as many caches as possible and clock up the miles on the way."
Or it might be a little vague, like the geocoin I found in the box under the cafe roof in Paris. I think something's being lost in translation, but I'll take the thing home to Scotland, it hasn't been there yet.
It might be very specific, like the wee squishy rugby ball toy attached to some trackable dogtags I found in Fulwell. Its mission is to go to specific rugby stadia, ending up in New Zealand in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup final. One of its goals was to go to a specific cache in Olympic Park in Sydney. I was just about to go to Sydney when I found it, and this coincidence brought home to me the message-in-a-bottle thrill of this particular part of geocaching. Trackable owners have talked of their kids' enjoyment (and their own) at logging in and discovering that an item has travelled, either a few miles or thousands.
I'm going home, currently sat in Charles de Gaul airport in the sweltering heat, positively relishing the thought of Scotland, where they know how to do October weather properly. Bring on the rain.
But this ending point of my travels, on tour with the amazing people of DV8 Physical Theatre, is coming at a good time, just before my son turns 7. I've been to some amazing places and seen the insides of some amazing theatres. On the scarce time off it's far too easy just to sleep, or mooch around and not really get out and see something of the places we've been touring. Geocaching has come at a perfect time for me, giving me an impetus to get out of bed, out of the hotel and into the place I'm visiting.
It's a sort of lucky dip tourism, taking me places I'd almost certainly never have gone to, sometimes utterly off the beaten track, sometimes firmly on it, but with the treasure hunt making it feel pleasingly parallel to the tourist route you're following. The people around you are sightseeing, or going about their daily lives. You have the added illicit thrill of being on a mission. Dates on buildings, numbers of letterboxes, statues, signs, sights: these things have extra meaning now, they encode the location of your prize, or the next step towards it.
Saltcoats, Ayrshire, the future.
My son grins and looks out for passersby as I casually stuff the small plastic tub he's filled with trinkets and trackables under the rock he likes to play on. This is his birthday present, and we'll watch together and see if his trackable travels far. We walk past this rock every day. Dozens of people do. Now it has a secret, a story to tell and a treasure to find. We'll watch, and see who might track it down.
Tim
Max's geocache is live, at last and has been found precisely twice so far :) We've also added a trackable for Lyra and Max's Doctor Who trackable is off on its travels already. Yipee!
Geocaching, Travel