bgola

Last Thursday, July 7th 8th (thanks Rodrigo), I was looking for some new apps that uses the GPS feature of my Nokia N95 phone and found something more interesting than a software, a treasure hunting game played by lots of people using GPS devices around the world!

The game is called Geocaching and exists since 2000 when David Ulmer decided to hide a “treasure” and made public it’s exact coordinates in an internet forum for GPS users. After three days someone found the treasure and then another one and the Geocaching was created

Basically you choose a “cache” (there are many sites with lists of caches around the world, the biggest one is www.geocaching.com), set up you GPS and start the hunt!

Well, as July 9th is holiday here in São Paulo I decided to search for a cache. Me and three friends (Thiago, Ricardo and Pessoal ) went to Serra da Cantareira to find the Pedra Grande cache

After some walk (approximately 3.5 km) we were at an altitude of 1010m, what a view from São Paulo!

The cache was well hidden and we took some minutes to find it. The Geocaching rules are simple, if you find the cache you should take a gift from it and leave another for the next geocacher. You also should sign the logbook (if any)

We took a plastic dinosaur and an euro coin and left a Firefox tattoo (free software for geocachers, yeah!), a São Paulo train ticker, a public phone card and a card from Ricardo’s music group.

After finding the cache you should also make an entry in the site (geocaching.com for example) talking about you experience.

It was great and a really different activity. I will try to find more caches next weekends!

If you have a GPS unit, go find some caches!