Geocaching, by Kevin

Geocaching is brilliant. A lot of people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What geocaching is, is finding hidden treasure using your handheld GPS receiver. GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It uses a constellation of between 24 and 32 Medium Earth Orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals, which allows GPS receivers to determine the location, speed, and direction of the user. It was developed by the United States Department of Defense and its official title is NAVSTAR-GPS. It is used by the United States Air Force in its jet fighters and bombers and missile systems, by the CIA to locate operatives and take secret photographs of enemy installations, and it is also used in map-making, land surveying, the scientific study of earthquakes, and synchronization of telecommunications networks. I use it for geocaching.

With geocaching, what you do is you go to a geocaching Web site (there are literally millions on the Internet, with names such as geocaching.com or geocaching.co.uk, but not geocaching.fr) and you decide where you want to go to look for treasure. Let us say you live in Birmingham, like I do, and you want to spend a pleasant day not in Birmingham. Then you will go to the geocaching Web site and type in, for example, Hockley Heath or Warwick Castle or Stratford upon Avon or the Lickey Hills or Packwood House. Packwood House is very nice and you can take sandwiches which you can eat in the grounds and they won't throw you out. I take a Tupperware box with a tomato a banana an apple and luncheon meat sandwiches and a Fanta. I give my tomato to the peacocks because I don't like tomato. Packwood House also has a walled garden that you can hide in until your sister cries.

So you type in the name of the place not in Birmingham that you want to be in, and on the Web site, if you are lucky, there will be the very precise GPS co-ordinates of the nearest geocache to that place for you to find. So what you do is, you key the co-ordinates into your GPS system, and you activate it so that the receiver also finds your current location, and then you put on your socks, your pants, your vest, your trousers, your shirt, your pullover, your Casio watch, your glasses, and your shoes, and you go to the toilet. When you have been to the toilet, you get undressed and have a shower, get dressed again, say goodbye to your mom and dad, and go home for breakfast. After you have had breakfast, you pack your Tupperware box, put on your bicycle clips and cagoule if it looks like rain; if it does not look like rain, you can pack the cagoule in a haversack or pump bag for when it rains later.

If you want, you can invite friends to go with you geocaching, but usually that ruins it. They will always think they know better, and they never do, and then they will race to find the cache, and it is a pain in the hole when they get it first, because they always pull the gonk out and wave it around and say ha ha ha, look Kevin it's you. People are just stupid.


What a gonk is

A gonk is a small troll-like toy with fiery pink or orange hair that girls put on the end of their pencils.


What a gonk is not.

A gonk is not a term of abuse for people with red hair. Anyway, my dad says at least it proves my ancestors were born in this country. Where do your ancestors come from, Stephen Higginbotham? Probably Russia or somewhere.


The GPS system used by the American military is precise down to millimeters, so they can locate and destroy something as tiny as an ant living in Moscow using an intercontinental missile fired from the Persian Gulf, say, or Poland. The GPS system that we civilians are allowed to use is not so precise, however, for fear that a nutter should get hold of a nuclear bomb and decide that HE wants to kill ants without permission. What this means is, is that when you get to the geocache site, there is always an element of suspense because you will not be able to locate the cache straight away. Besides, the person who has hidden the cache does not want just any old thicko finding his cache. They would not appreciate it and would probably treat it derisorily. Derisorily is a word that means "with contempt." That would spoil everything for geocachers, but there are some people who are like that. In my class, even.

So you have to search for the cache, usually hidden under a bush or down a drain or inside the base of a statue. Once, in Hockley Heath, I found a dead dog in the canal. It was nothing to do with the cache, though. In fact, over the years, I have found more than one dead dog in Birmingham's canals. I expect they committed suicide. Birmingham can do that to a dog.

When you find the cache, you take a photo of yourself holding it to post on the Web site to prove that you found it and not just saying you did to impress girls. In the typical cache, you will find a gonk, a Blue Peter badge, a 3-D or Magic Eye picture, a puzzle like a Rubik's Cube that you can solve and then mess up again for the next cacher, a photograph of Stephen Hawking, a model Darth Maul, and a piece of paper for you to sign, indicating who you are and the date on which you found the cache, and what you took out of the cache and what you put into it. This is the particular joy of geocaching, because you are allowed to take a piece of the treasure and in return someone else gets the chance to choose something of yours that you put in. As you can see from the above list, however, you can't just leave behind any old crap. It has to be something that you know other geocachers will treasure. Also you cannot put in food or living creatures, even if they are crap ones like ladybirds, not because it is cruel but because who wants a dead ladybird? If everyone did that, the cache would eventually contain nothing except dead ladybirds, and there would be no point to the entire exercise, would there? No. You have to put in something which shows (1) that you are clever and (2) that you are considerate of the interests of other geocachers. I usually leave a page from one of Douglas Adams's books. All geocachers like Douglas Adams, and reading the page will give them happy thoughts. Also, the Independent on Sunday gave away a whole load of Douglas Adams's books a while ago, so they cost me nothing. I got them off my dad. He didn't want them anyway. He was just annoyed that the paperboy hadn't delivered his Mail on Sunday. I think he went to the paper shop and got the boy sacked.

Anyway, I hope that you will do geocaching now that I have shown you how good it is.

And that is the end.





(Kevin MacPherson is head of psychogeography at King Edward VII School for Boys, Edgbaston.)