We are always on the lookout for photos from events or cool caches, as well as any fun, interesting, unusual or exciting geocaching stories to share with the geocaching community. If you want to share yours, send it to us by emailing it to our webmasters.
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Do you remember that tomorrow is International Geocaching Day? Earn the official International Geocaching Day 2019 souvenir by logging a geocache or attending an event on 17 August 2019. We trust you will have a great time celebrating this occasion!
Left: GPSFrodo Right: How the geocaching website looked back in the beginning of 2001, when GCZA01 was placed. Also viewable here.
Can you tell us a little about how you heard about geocaching?
My introduction to GPS ‘games’ started with the Degree Confluence project. After logging a confluence in KZN I saw a post on usenet (yes we still used that in those days ;)) about a Stash that Dave Ulmer in the USA had placed, and published coordinates for. This sounded like an awesome idea and thus my introduction to geocaching began.
We see your first intro into GPS games was with the Degree Confluence project. Can you tell us a bit about this?
The Degree confluence Project was started in 1996 by Alex Jarrett. The idea behind the project is to document all the confluences accessible on land. A confluence is an intersection of a longitude and latitude, and for the purposes of the project, only integer confluences are considered. Below is a map I created in early 2001 to show the confluences:
You can find a lot more detail on the project page for South Africa here.
What was your first gps?
My first GPS was a Garmin Etrex. It was the original, ugly, yellow model that couldn’t load maps or do any routing. It still used a serial port connection then. See this for the older model comparisons.
What made you plant GCZA01 where you did?
If I knew then what I know now …. You know the old saying. At the time of placing GCZA01, there were no real rules. My main reason for placing it on a friend’s farm was that I could get permission to place it. I contacted the botanical gardens in Pretoria first to see if I could place a cache there. Well, you try to explain this “Treasure Hunt” game with GPSs to an administrative type … and yeah, you guessed the answer. Since the 1st geocache in the States was placed on private property, I thought I’d do the same.
Can you describe the cache container and it’s hiding spot? Was there any significance to the things you added to the cache?
The cache container was a regular Tupperware plastic box. It contained some CDRs, a novel, log book and pen, greetings letter (which I’m sorry I didn’t copy) and wrist watch. The watch was the only significant item. I worked for a Danish software company at the time (Navision Software) and they had a company branded watch, which I bought specifically to place in the cache. The reason for its inclusion was that I was pretty sure it was unique in the country and there wouldn’t be 2 like it ;) As far as I know Jors still has it.
Yes, Jors kept it and made it into a trackable!
There was no reviewing process, no rules. You logged the hide and that was that.
We see you have reactivated your geocaching account and found a couple of geocaches this year. How did you get back into the game?
A friend of mine owns a motorcycle accessories shop in Centurion. While there I saw he had a handheld GPS on the shelf that mentioned geocaching on the box. Easy sell for him ;).
Did you ever think that the game would develop to what it has become – a game with over 3 million geocaches worldwide with many different cache types and geocaches suited to every type of cacher?
That question actually has 2 very different answers.
Do you have geocaches on a bucket list that you’d like to do one day?
I would love to visit GCGV0P and and GC30.
Several South African geocachers got the news on 4 June that they had been randomly selected to receive a Virtual Reward from Geocaching HQ! They had been allocated one of 4,000 unpublished new Virtual Caches that had just been released worldwide. Virtual Reward 2.0 had just happened, and in the process allocated about 40 new Virtual Geocaches (by our rough count on social media) to South African geocachers who had qualified for the random selection process by being an active geocache owner with more than 25 favourite points. Many new virtual geocaches have already been published across the country, from the Kruger National Park to Cape Town, and there are sure to be many more over the next few months. You can read more about the history of Virtual Geocaches in South Africa in our website article here (which is probably out of date already at the time of publication of this newsletter), or search the geocaching.com website for your nearest new Virtual here.
https://mysteryatthemuseum.com/ for the Breaking News!
Virtuals are a special geocache type where there is no physical container hidden and they are more about discovering a location rather than a container. This cache type was grandfathered in 2005 and no new virtuals could be created since then. On 24 August 2017, Geocaching HQ announced Virtual Rewards 1.0 where approximately 4000 geocachers had been selected and given the opportunity to create a new virtual cache. Read about it on the blog and listen to the podcast here. On occasion, Geocaching HQ will issue new virtuals to be placed.
South Africa was home to very few virtuals and before August 2017, there were only 7 in the country with 1 in Nelspruit and the others in Cape Town.
Geocaching was still in its infancy in South Africa when virtuals could be created and there were only 14 virtuals created and published with 7 subsequently being archived over the years. Interestingly, 13 of the virtuals were placed in the Western Cape with no other provinces besides Mpumalanga having ever had a virtual geocache.
During Virtual Rewards 1.0, 22 new virtuals were placed in South Africa. Eight in Cape Town, three in Port Elizabeth, one in Pietermaritzburg, one in Durban, three in the Kruger National Park, two in Pretoria, three in Johannesburg and one in the Drakensberg. Virtual Rewards 2.0 resulted in 55 new virtuals less than a month after the Virtual rewards were given! You can add another 16 to the number through Virtual Rewards 3.0 and thus far an additional 6 from Virtual Rewards 4.0.
We now have 116 virtuals in South Africa and 1 in Lesotho.
HIghest Viewing point of the Van Standens Bridge
Virtual Reward 3.0: Virtuals created 2022 - 2023
Virtual Reward 4.0: Virtuals created 2024
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