Tiago became acquainted with Geocaching a few days ago and today him, Rui and myself went out hunting for our first two caches ever.

If you love being outdoors, Mother Nature is for you a good companion but you never heard of Geocaching before, I strongly suggest you spend some time around Geocashing.com, particularly its FAQ page. For us, it’s been a real thrill, we’ve been having jolly good fun and best of all, one can actually breathe out there in the field. Looking for the “cache” itself is cool, but the way I see it, it’s just a means to an end. And the end is enjoying a good walk, a good sight, a good laugh along the way.

I’ve documented our first two quests in my Geocaching page, complete with the pictures we were able to shoot using our mobile phones (no digital cameras available this week, unfortunately). Because the only thing we have available is pretty much the GPS coordinates of the cache site - and possibly sparse and less than helpful hints - we usually are pretty much clueless as to what the setting looks like. Today was such a pleasant surprise that it’s hard to put it down into words. Paradise lost? Maybe. The pictures speak for themselves, I guess. Each cache contains a logbook so anyone who finds it can write a few words to actually log the feat. It was fantastic to sit down and read logs from people coming all the way from Spain or Holland, for instance.

Oh and if you’re interested in Geocaching in Portugal, you might want to check out the Portuguese geographic distribuition of caches (via Tiago). Wouldn’t it be nice to use the Google Maps API for this, too? ;)

Finally, one thing I was happy to learn about the Geocaching community is how aware of the environmental problems they seem to be. There is a pretty cool initiative called Cache In, Trash Out, which basically supports the idea of cleaning up whatever trash one may find in the cache site.

So for tomorrow, we’re planning to go out and find at least another one, a few miles away from where we live. And if you’re interested, you can always check out the aftermath in my geocashing page.

<update> Update: Bruno Rodrigues has written in (see comments) providing a really interesting response to my “disguised” plea for a Google Maps interface of the geographic distribution of caches. Check it out! (from Geocaching@PT)

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