I had always thought geocaching had sprung, fully-formed, from the skull of the geeky sport of orienteering, which is basically recreational map reading while running. But it is not so!
Geocaching is where you leave GPS coordinates listed somewhere for people to find… then they use their GPS to find a box buried somewhere which you left for them, along with maybe a notebook or prizes or something. Periodically you check the box for what mementos strangers left you…
But it’s very very very similar to letterboxing , an older hobby where you leave cryptic clues leading to the wherabouts of a buried box. I like the suggestion of leaving with your notebook a personalized rubber ink stamp, which the finder uses to stamp his own letterboxing log. He would also carry his own personal stamp, which he would use to leave a mark in the letterbox cache’s notebook. It reminds me of Japanese temples and other tourist stops, where they have stamps for any given place. I always stamped my big-ass road map of Japan with it. I think I have about half a dozen.
Letterboxing seems to me a very lonely hobby- maybe the kind of hobby you’d pick if you had some horrible disfigurement that made ordinary social interaction unlikely.
Or maybe, in the future, when plagues run rampant across the world and everyone stays their entire lives in their own quarantined village for fear of infection, letterboxing is a variant on the only way any inter-village commerce gets done. No human contact… Bandits cannot find your package, you know… they can barely read. Dirty untouchables. Be sure to autoclave the shipment when you find it! Be careful not to rip your environment suit! If you do, we won’t let you back in the village walls.
Letterboxing links:
- Urban Letterboxing (UK)
- Letterboxing North America
- Letterboxing Central
- Atlas Quest: International Letterboxing
- NPR Story
- World of Letterboxing
- Wikipedia entry on letterboxing
Geocaching links:
- Geocaching
- Navicache
- Wikipedia entry on geocaching
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