Читать книгу Bushell's Best Bits - Everything You Needed To Know About The World's Craziest Sports - Mike Bushell - Страница 43

‘There are screams coming out of bushes right across the country,’ beamed Sue Gough as she clutched her husband’s hand. We were standing on a hill overlooking the Chilterns, and she was right. I had stumbled into another world, one in which country walks would never be the same, and one which has provided the world with one of its biggest family weekend activities.

It’s one of the great problems for any parent. How do you tempt the kids out for a walk on a cold, wet January afternoon when they would much rather stay cosy in front of the television and on their computer games? Well, we all know a bit of bribery works, so just offer them some ‘treasure’ and the shoes and coats will be on quicker than you can say ‘geocaching’.

It’s a sport with a very short history. There are no records of ancient Egyptians doing this activity, although the basics of hiding and seeking do go back a long way. We can trace geocaching back to one day: the date when the much hailed ‘great blue switch’ in America was flicked to ‘on’. It was 2 May 2000, and 24 satellites around the world were upgraded so that in an instant, the accuracy of GPS technology across the world was radically improved. A day later, a GPS enthusiast wanted to test the accuracy of the new system, so he hid a container in the woods and marked down the co-ordinates with a GPS unit. He thought he would see if someone else could find the exact spot, using their own GPS device. A note was left: ‘take some stuff and leave some stuff.’

For the first few months, it was just experienced GPS users who played this form of hide and seek. It only became a worldwide phenomenon when a web designer from Seattle stumbled on the activity and created the first geocaching website. He started with the motto: ‘if you hide it they will come’. And they did. Families, children, anyone who could download the geocache app to their mobile phones or tablets.

It sounds like you’re a part of a secret society when you claim to be a geocacher. The ‘geo’ comes from the word geography, while the caching is simply the process of hiding a cache. Now, 13 years on, wherever you are it’s more than likely there will be little boxes or containers hiding in the verges, trees and walls around you. Geocaching is an outside exploration activity which you join by getting a GPS device, or by downloading the app onto a mobile phone. You then register on the website, and get the rough locations of ‘treasure’ in your local area.

There was no stopping the children, teenagers and dogs in the group of 30 I joined at Longwick near Princes Risborough. We had split into groups of three and the race was on to find the first hidden boxes.

‘There’s nothing over there,’ said the young girl on my team. ‘We should try in the tunnel’. Before I could refer to my phone again, they were off, tramping through the muddy puddles under the railway tunnel, overtaking another huddle of excited explorers.

The information and clues that you collect from the website beforehand will only get you near to each secret stash – and that’s if you have read the co-ordinates correctly. The rest is down to looking, rummaging, and sniffing out the target.

We were close to a find. Like a pack of hounds, the teams had converged on a footpath and were picking through the winter skeletons of blackberry bushes hoping to be the first to tick the cache off the list. It was getting increasingly frantic and noisy, when ‘it’s here!’ and ‘got it!’ were the triumphant cries. We all poured over to a puddle where a tiny green canister, no bigger than a pepper pot, was just poking out of the mud. Its green lid was camouflaged like a tiddlywink counter, resting on the water.

Inside was a notebook, which we were invited to sign, along with pencils, rubbers and all sorts of small accessories. The value of the items didn’t matter at all. This was all about the thrill of discovery. Finders are allowed to take something out as long as they replace it with something else, and so I rolled up an autographed picture of my lovely colleague Susannah Reid and popped it inside with an Olympic badge. I am not sure Susannah knows that her picture was placed into a bog in Buckinghamshire, but I am sure it has been taken and moved somewhere else by now.

‘You see instead of just having a mindless walk with nothing to do we can go and look for treasure,’ added rosy-cheeked Sue. She prodded her husband Mike: ‘You are like a big kid on these hunts,’ she joked. ‘It’s inexpensive and still a little bit geeky,’ he chipped in. ‘Although the children are off the computers for a day, they are still gadgeted up. It’s another dimension and educational.’

It’s a good idea to have a stick with you, to prize back the undergrowth. Suddenly we were running, as if the forest was alive with gold. News had come through that one of the first boxes to have been placed in the UK was nearby. We were at the top of a steep hill with the sweeping Chilterns draping away beyond the horizon line of grass. ‘Down here, down here!’ and we were charging, unable to stop, down the tufty bank, like a pack of wolves sensing a kill.

The teenager at the front led us to a small copse and the more agile among us climbed between the spider’s web of branches to claim the prize. A green metal box, the size of an A4 folder, was dusted off and removed from its place in the cradle of a tree. Inside among the toys and the artefacts was a 10th birthday card. This had been signed by visitors in 2011, and it marked 10 years since the cache had been placed here, just after the birth of this sport. We had become part of the evolution linking the present to the past. For the kids, it was as if they had unearthed a Roman village, or Neolithic burial ground. Some of the secrets of our predecessors, albeit only from the last 10 years, were here for us all to pick over.

‘I love going around, trading toys and getting others,’ said one of the young explorers. ‘It’s really exciting and thrilling when you find something, and it’s worth going in bushes and getting pricked for,’ added another pioneer. ‘I don’t normally go out on a walk,’ said another girl, ‘I don’t have a dog or anything but this makes it so different.’

We signed the card, added our own items, took a couple of souvenirs and the box was placed back to rest. From humble beginnings here, this game has exploded around the world in an almost unbelievable way. There are now 75 thousand caches in the UK with millions hidden worldwide.

‘They are there on the International Space Station,’ said Paul Burroughes, from the Geocaching Association of Great Britain, GAGB. ‘There’s one at the bottom of the Atlantic, and some in Antarctica.’

This is when you get into extreme caching, which is a more advanced version of this sport. It involves climbing trees, going underground, and using mountaineering skills to navigate rock-faces and diving beneath rivers and oceans.

For us on that January day in the Chilterns, the woods, the hedgerows and puddles were enough. I decided to slip away from the crowd. It was nice to get a moment of peace away from the chattering chase, but I now had my own cache to hide. Once you have registered you can plant your own box out there in the wilderness. It must be on public land or you must have got permission from the landowner.

I found a large hole underneath a tree and tenderly pushed my Tupperware box of treats inside. I marked the location down on my phone app, and when I got home, I put the clues to its whereabouts on the website. My cache was then ‘live’.

I had also included what is known as a ‘travel bug’. This is a little tag which has your own details on it. When someone finds one of these, they take it with them, on to the next geocache they find. They mark on the website where it’s gone too and you can track your bug’s journey. People often set goals for their travel bug. For example, to see how long it takes to get to every country in Europe, and how fast it takes to go from coast to coast. They note on the website where it has moved on to and it’s a great adventure just tracking the voyage of your bug around the world. Within three days, mine had gone to Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, and the last time I checked it was near Munich in Germany.

To join this world wide craze, please check out www.gagb.org.uk. This gives you more information about geocaching and has links to the main sites. It also tells you how to contact landowners about geocaching on their land.

Since I first came across this whole new world, I have been staggered by the number of people who go out searching through the bushes. The person next to you, right now, on the bus, or on the train, might be one of them, and when you’re next on a walk and you hear shouts of excitement coming from the undergrowth, you know what it could mean.