»
a dirt track close to the airport that
afternoon, GPS in hand, with Mike Douglas
07
,
one of the island’s most prolific geocachers,
who’d agreed to showme the ropes.
We were searching out a nearby cache
while he explained the rules of planting
them. As he was telling me the main one,
that a new cache must be at least 161m away
from an existing one, my GPS device started
bleeping, signalling we were close.
I looked down and there it was, peeking
out from under a pile of rocks: a plastic kids’
lunchbox containing a well-filled logbook,
which anyone who finds it adds to, and a
small frog keychain. My first geocache
08
. The
find was unexpectedly satisfying and ignited
my enthusiasm for planting my own.
L
ess than 10 hours later, that
enthusiasmwas being sorely
tested. It was 6am and I was sitting
at the base end of Mount Teide’s
cable car
09
(telefericoteide.com)
,
around 2,300m up, shivering in the
darkness. I should have been halfway
through a four-hour hike to the volcano’s
summit with my guide, Jorge González from
Gaiatours
(gaiatours.es),
but in a bitter twist
of irony considering the task at hand, GPS
had turned against me.
I’d woken at 2am in order to give myself
plenty of time to make it to the Teide
National Park by 4am. This may seem like a
ludicrously early time to attempt a mountain
ascent, but Teide is so popular that you have
to secure a permit before you climb. Ours
co-ordinates, there are now over 2.5million
caches planted in almost every country and
terrain, from the Sahara Desert to the ocean
floor. I was hoping to plant two more. One,
as you may have already guessed, on the
seabed, the other atop Mount Teide
06
,
a 3,700m volcano that is also Spain’s highest
summit. The idea was that, as well as seeing
another side of the island from the usual
tourist haunts, I would also learn a bit more
about this growing global craze.
That was how I came to be scurrying down
In case you’ve not heard of it, geocaching
is best described as a 21st-century treasure
hunt. Using GPS devices and following
co-ordinates logged online, participants set
out to locate items hidden by other players.
These treasures, known as a ‘caches’, aren’t all
that valuable in themselves – usually some
kind of plastic vessel containing a logbook
(to register those who discover it) and trinkets
– but fans enjoy the hunt for them as it allows
them to explore new places, and to share their
findings with others.
According to
geocaching.com,
the website
where all caches are logged by their GPS
05
09
06
04
0 5 7
T H E C H A L L E N G E
T E N E R I F E
