What a truly spectacular cache. FP awarded, without hesitation. I’ve seen a similar kind in a library before but never with such depth, such a story, so voluminous a container, nor –
let’s be honest – so beautiful a building!
The Wolfson room was packed, presumably with people studying for their upcoming exams, but I found a seat there to work out the final location. Once there, I made my way up and found it
without difficulty. No trouble with the numbers from me.
I’m going to try to tag one or two more Manchester caches before I catch my train home, but I can’t imagine any will hold a candle to this. TFTC!
Found following a short hunt and a brief rummage after walking up the nearby footpath, with the help of a previous log which talked about crossing a fence (which I didn’t need to do, having come up
the correct way in the first place).
Some fellow volunteers and I are meeting at a hotel to the West of here for a weekend of making
software to help charities. When we meet up, I have a tradition of getting up early and finding a geocache or two before breakfast. Having exhausted the very-local supply of caches
on previous visits, and not wishing to miss out on the tradition on this, geocaching’s 25th birthday, I decided it was time to come further afield (and to finally solve this puzzle!…
I’m still stumped by its sibling, though!).
Nice container. Log slightly damp, but still usable. TFTC, and FP awarded for the enjoyable (once I spotted a pattern!) puzzle.
An excellent container in a picturesque spot. FP awarded. The geopup didn’t want to come exploring off the path so I had to find this one by myself.
SL, TFTC.
Never one to let a hard day’s voluntary work keep me from a geocaching expedition, this afternoon I took a hot brisk walk up the scar to find this (and hopefully next another nearby!)
cache. Caught my breath sitting on a rock near the GZ, before pressing on. SL, TNLN, TFTC. FP awarded for such a delightful spot.
Apparently Automattic are laying off around one in six of their workforce. And I’m one of the unlucky ones.
Anybody remote hiring for a UK-based full-stack web developer (in a world that doesn’t seem to believe that full-stack developers exist anymore) with 25+ years professional experience,
specialising in PHP, Ruby, JS, HTML, CSS, devops, and about 50% of CMSes you’ve ever heard of (and probably some you haven’t)… with a flair for security, accessibility,
standards-compliance, performance, and DexEx?
I’m visiting Istanbul to meet with colleagues, but we took some time off from our meetings and work this afternoon to come and get lost in the Grand Bazaar. While browsing the amazing
diversity of stalls I found myself staring at the floors, which are made of the same kind of limestone as my kitchen floor (in which my kids love hunting for fossils!). Wouldn’t that
make a great Earthcache, I thought… and it turns out it anyway is one! So I spent a little while hunting for the best fossil I could find (I’d hoped for a gastropod of some kind, but
had to settle for a bivalve), and sent the answers to the CO. Fantastic stuff. TFTC! FP awarded. And,
possibly, FTF!
Ruth bought me a copy of The Adventure Challenge: Couples
Edition, which is… well, it’s basically a book of 50 curious and unusual ideas for date activities. This week, for the first time, we gave it a go.
Each activity is hidden behind a scratch-off panel, and you’re instructed not to scratch them off until you’re committed to following-through with whatever’s on the other side. Only
the title and a few hints around it provide a clue as to what you’ll actually be doing on your date.
As a result, we spent this date night… baking a pie!
The book is written by Americans, but that wasn’t going to stop us from making a savoury pie. Of course, “bake a pie” isn’t much of a challenge by itself, which is why the book
stipulates that:
One partner makes the pie, but is blindfolded. They can’t see what they’re doing.
The other partner guides them through doing so, but without giving verbal instructions (this is an exercise in touch, control, and nonverbal communication).
I was surprised when Ruth offered to be the blindfoldee: I’d figured that with her greater experience of pie-making and my greater experience of doing-what-I’m-told, that’d be the
smarter way around.
We used this recipe for “mini creamy mushroom
pies”. We chose to interpret the brief as permitting pre-prep to be done in accordance with the ingredients list: e.g. because the ingredients list says “1 egg, beaten”, we were
allowed to break and beat the egg first, before blindfolding up.
This was a smart choice (breaking an egg while blindfolded, even under close direction, would probably have been especially stress-inducing!).
I’d do it again but the other way around, honestly, just to experience both sides! #JustSwitchThings
I really enjoyed this experience. It forced us into doing something different on date night (we have developed a bit of a pattern, as folks are wont to do), stretched our
comfort zones, and left us with tasty tasty pies to each afterwards. That’s a win-win-win, in my book.
Plus, communication is sexy, and so anything that makes you practice your coupley-communication-skills is fundamentally hot and therefore a great date night activity.
Our pies may have been wonky-looking, but they were also delicious.
So yeah: we’ll probably be trying some of the other ideas in the book, when the time comes.
Some of the categories are pretty curious, and I’m already wondering what other couples we know that’d be brave enough to join us for the “double date” chapter: four challenges for
which you need a second dyad to hang out with? (I’m, like… 90% sure it’s not going to be swinging. So if we know you and you’d like to volunteer yourselves, go ahead!)
The geopup and I were out running some errands this damp afternoon and figured we’d take a walk near here. Spotting the cache on our radar we took a short diversion to find this cache,
which despite not having a visitor yet this year nor for the entirety of last year is in perfect condition. A quick and easy find as cars whooshed past us, then a muddy meander back
past the drainage works and on our way.
SL. TFTC, and a pity-FP awarded simply for being a well-maintained but
under-appreciated cache.
After claiming the FTF on the new cache to the North East, the geohound and I continued our walk with a wander through thy
woods, eventually finding ourselves near this gate. I’d nearly attempted this cache during a previous visit to these woods but IIRC was dragged right past it by impatient dogs,
children, or both. 😂
Today, though, it was a QEF for the doggo and I. Fun container and a good size too, FP awarded. TFTC!
I’ve been on holiday on the islands of Trinidad & Tobago this week. These island nations span graticules that are dominated by the Caribbean and Atlantic Oceans, so it’s little wonder
there’s never been an attempted geohashing expedition in them. So when a hashpoint popped-up in a possibly-accessible location, I had to go for it!
For additional context: Trinidad & Tobago is currently under a state of
emergency as gang warfare and an escalating murder rate has reached a peak. It’s probably ill-advised to go far off the beaten track, especially as somebody who’s clearly a foreign
tourist. The violence and danger is especially prevalent in and around parts of nearby Port of Spain.
As a result, my partner Ruth (wisely) agreed to drive with me to the GZ strictly under the understanding that we’d turn back at a moment’s notice if anything looked remotely sketchy,
and we’d take every precaution on the way to, from, and at the hashpoint area (e.g. keeping car doors locked when travelling and not getting out unless necessary and safe to do so,
keeping valuables hidden out of sight, knowing the location of the nearest police station at any time, etc.).
I don’t have my regular geohashing kit with me, but I’ve got a smartphone, uLogger sending 5-minute GPS location pings (and the ability to send a location when I press a button in the
app, for proof later), and a little bravery, so here we go…
Expedition
Our plane from Tobago landed around 15:20 local time, following an ahead-of-schedule flight assisted by a tailwind from the Atlantic side. We disembarked, collected our bags, and
proceeded to pick up a hire car.
Our Caribbean Airlines aircraft, landed at Piarco airport.
Our original plan for our stay in Trinidad had been to drive up to an AirBnB near 10.743817, -61.514248 on Paramin, one of Tobago’s highest summits. However,
our experience of driving up Mount Dillon on Tobago earlier in the week showed us that the rural
mountain roads around here can be terrifyingly dangerous for non-locals1,
and so we chickened out and investigated the possibility of arranging a last-minute stay at a lodge on the edge of the rainforest in Gran Couva, or else failing that a fallback plan of
a conventional tourist-centric hotel in the North of Port of Spain.
By this point, we’d determined that the hashpoint was in the old sugar growing region of Caroni, in which our originally-intended accommodation at Gran Couva could be found, and so it
seemed feasible that we might be able to safely deviate from our route only a little to get to the hashpoint before reaching our beds. We were particularly keen to be at a place of
known safety before the sun set, here in an unusual part of an unfamiliar country! So when the owner of our proposed lodge in Gran Couva called to say that he couldn’t accept our
last-minute booking on account of ongoing renovations to his property, we had to quickly arrange ourself a room at our backup hotel.
This put us in an awkward position: now the hashpoint really wasn’t anything-like on the way from the airport to where we’d be staying, and we’d doubtless be spending longer
than we’d like to be on the road and increasing the risk that we’d be out after dark. I reassured Ruth, whose appetite for risk is somewhat lower than mine, that if we set out for the
hashpoint and anything seemed “off” we could turn around at any time, and we began our journey.
Putting a brave/excited face on as we set off in our rental car.
Boosted by her experience of driving on Tobago, Ruth continued to show her rapidly-developing Trinbagonian road skills2.
Driving down a network of crisscrossing roads.
Despite increasingly heavy traffic on our minor roads, possibly resulting from a crash that had occurred on the Southbound carriageway of the nearby Uriah Butler Highway which was
causing drivers to seek a shortcut through the suburbs, we made reasonable time, and were soon in the vicinity of the hashpoint: a mixed-use residential/light commercial estate of the
kind that apparently sprung up in places that were, until very late in the 20th century, lands used for sugar cane plantations.
At this point, the maps started to become less and less useful: Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, and Bing Maps completely disagreed as to whether we were driving on Bhagan Trace, Cemetery
Street, or Roy Gobin Fifth Avenue, as well as disagreeing on whether we were driving into a cul-de-sac or whether it was possible to loop around at the end to return back to the main
roads. It was now almost 17:00 and we were greeted by a large number of cars coming out of the narrow street in the opposite direction to us, going in, and squeezing past us: presumably
workers from one of the businesses down here going home for the evening.
There are highways we’d been recommended to avoid because of the safety situation here, but this one was okay.
My GPS flickered as it tried to make sense of the patchwork of streets, and I asked Ruth to slow down and pull over a couple of times until I was sure that we’d gotten as close as we
could, by road. Looking out of my window, I saw the empty lot that I’d scouted from satellite photography, but it was hopelessly overgrown. If the hashpoint was within it, it’d take
hours of work and a machete to cut through. The circle of uncertainty jumped around as I tried to finalise the signal without daring to do the obvious thing of holding my phone outside
the car window. A handful of locals watched us, the strange white folks sitting in a new car, as I poked at my devices in an effort to check if we were within the circle, or at least if
we would be when, imminently, we were forced to park even closer to the side to let a larger vehicle force its way through next to us!
Pulled up at the hashpoint.
At the point at which I thought we’d made it, I hit the “save waypoint” at 17:06 button and instructed Ruth to drive on. We turned in the road and I started navigating us to our hotel,
only thinking to look at the final location I’d tagged later, when we felt safer. We drove back into Port of Spain avoiding Laventille (another zone we’d been particularly recommended
to stay away from) while I resisted the urge to double-check my tracklog, instead focussing on trying to provide solid directions through not-always-signposted streets: we had a wrong
turning at one point when we came off the highway at Bamboo Settlement No. 1 (10.627952, -61.429083) but thankfully this was an easy mistake to course-correct from.
View of the hashpoint again as we turn to go home
It was only when I looked at my tracklog, later, that I discovered that the point I’d tagged was exactly 8.59 metres from the hashpoint, plus or minus a circle of uncertainty of… 9
metres. Amazingly, we’d succeeded without even being certain we’d done so. Having failed to get a silly grin photo at the hashpoint, we sufficed to get one while we drank
celebratory Prosecco and ate tapas on the rooftop bar of our hotel, looking down on the beautiful bay and imposing mountains of this beautiful if intimidating island.
Silly drinky grins atop our hotel North of Port of Spain
Tracklog
I didn’t bring my primary GPSr, but my phone keeps a general-purpose tracklog at ~5min/50m intervals, and when I
prompt it to. Apologies that this makes my route map look “jumpier” than usual, especially when I’m away from the GZ.
Achievements
Footnotes
1 Often, when speaking to locals, they’d ask if it was our first time in Trinidad &
Tobago, and on learning that it was, they’d be shocked to hear that we’d opted to drive for ourselves rather than to hire drivers to take us places: it turns out that the roads are in
very-variable condition, from wonderfully-maintained highways to rural trails barely-driveable without a 4×4, but locals in both drive with the same kind of assertive and sometimes
reckless attitude.
2 tl;dr of driving in Trinidad & Tobago, as somebody who learned to drive in the UK: (1)
if you need to get out of anywhere, don’t wait for anybody to yield because they won’t, even if you theoretically have the right of way: instead, force your way out by obstructing
others, (2) drive in the middle of the road wherever possible to make it easier to dodge potholes and other hazards, which are clustered near the soft verges, and swing to your own
side of the road only at the last second to avoid collisions, and (3) use your horn as often as you like and for any purpose: to indicate that you want to turn, to warn somebody that
you’re there, to tell somebody to move, to say hello to a nearby pedestrian you recognise, or in lieu of turning on your headlights at night, for example. The car horn is a universal
language, it seems.
As part of our trip to the two-island republic of Trinidad & Tobago, Ruth and I decided we’d love to take a
trip out to Buccoo Reef, off the coast of the smaller island. The place we’ve been staying
during the Tobago leg of our visit made a couple of phone calls for us and suggested that we head on down to the boardwalk at nearby Buccoo the next morning where we’d apparently be
able to meet somebody from Pops Tours who’d be able to take us out1.
I could have shown you a picture of the fun ‘I ♥️ Buccoo’ sign from the boardwalk, but I got distracted by a Magnificent Frigatebird circling overhead2.
At the allotted time, we found somebody from Pops Tours, who said that he was still waiting for their captain to get there3
and asked us to go sit under the almond tree down the other end of the boardwalk and he’d meet us there.
It was only after we left to follow the instructions that I remembered that I don’t know how to identify an almond tree. So we opted to sit under a tree near a chicken teaching her
chicks how to eat a coconut4. I still don’t know if that was right, but the boaters found us in the
end so it can’t have been too far off.
We’d previously clocked that one of the many small boats moored in the bay was Cariad, and found ourselves intensely curious. All of the other
boats we’d seen had English-language names of the kinds you’d expect: a well-equipped pleasure craft optimistically named Fish Finder, a small dual-motorcraft with the moniker
Bounty, a brightly-coloured party boat named Cool Runnings, and so on. To travel a third of the way around the world to find a boat named in a familiar Welsh word felt
strange.
Either you’re an extremely long way from home, boat, or else somebody around here has a surprising interest in the Welsh language.
So imagine our delight when the fella we’d been chatting to came over, explained that their regular tour boat (presumably the one pictured on their website) was in the shop, and said
that his cousin would be taking us out in his boat instead… and that cousin came over piloting… the Cariad!
As we climbed aboard, we spotted that he was wearing a t-shirt with a Welsh dragon on it, and a sticker on the side of the helm carried a Welsh flag. What strange coincidence is this,
that Ruth and I – who met while living in Wales and come for a romantic getaway to the Caribbean – should happen to find ourselves aboard a literal “love” boat named in Welsh.
Long shallow sandbars and reefs almost surround the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, leaving enormous areas accessible only to low-draft boats (and helping to protect the islands from
some of the worst of the weather that the Caribbean can muster).
There probably aren’t many boats on Earth that fly both the colours of Trinidad & Tobago and of Wales, so we naturally had to ask: did you name this boat?, and why? It
turns out that yes, our guide for the day has a love of and fascination with Wales that we never quite got to the bottom of. He’d taken a holiday to Swansea just last year, and would be
returning to Wales again later this year.
It’s strange to think that anybody might deliberately take a holiday from a tropical island paradise to come to drizzly cold Wales, but there you have it. It sounds like he was
into his football and that might have had an impact on his choice of destination, but choose to believe that maybe there’s a certain affinity between parts of the world that have
experienced historical oppression at the hands of a colonial English mindset? Like: perhaps Nigerians would enjoy India as a getaway destination, or Guyanans would dig Mauritius as a
holiday spot, too?5
I wrote previously about visiting the Nylon Pool, an waist-deep bit of ocean on a sandbar a full half a mile offshore.
We took a dip at the Nylon Pool, snorkelled around parts of Buccoo Reef (replete with tropical fish of infinite variety and colour), spotted sea turtles zipping around the boat, and
took a walk along No Man’s Land (a curious peninsula, long and thin and cut-off from the mainland by mangrove swamps, so-named
because Trinidadian law prohibits claiming ownership of any land within a certain distance of the high tide mark… and this particular beach spot consists entirely of such land,
coast-to-coast, on account of its extreme narrowness. All in all, it was a delightful boating adventure.
(And for the benefit of the prospective tourist who stumbles upon this blog post in years to come, having somehow hit the right combination of keywords: we paid $400 TTD6
for the pair of us: that’s about £48 GBP at today’s exchange rate, which felt like exceptional value for an amazing experience given that we got the expedition entirely to ourselves.)
Any worries I might have had about the seaworthiness of our vessel as its owner repeatedly bailed out the back of the boat with a small bucket were quickly assuaged when I realised
that I could probably walk most of the way back to shore, should I need to! (sadly not visible: the Welsh dragon on front of his t-shirt)
But aside from the fantastic voyage we got to go on, this expedition was noteworthy in particular for Cariad and her cymruphile captain. It feels like a special kind of
small-world serendipity to discover such immediate and significant common ground with a stranger on the other side of an ocean… to coincide upon a shared interest in a culture and place
less-foreign to you than to your host.
An enormous diolch yn fawr7 is due to Pops Tours for this remarkable experience.
Footnotes
1 Can I take a moment to observe how much easier it was to charter a boat in Tobago than
it was in Ireland, where I left several answerphone messages but never even got a response? Although in the Irish boat
owners’ defence, I was being creepy and mysterious by asking them to take me to random coordinates off the coast.
2 It’s possible that I’ve become slightly obsessed with frigatebirds since arriving here.
I first spotted them from our ferry ride from Trinidad to Tobago, noticing their unusually widely-forked tails, striking white (in the case of the
females) chests, and relatively-effortless (for a seabird) thermal-chasing flight. But they’re really cool! They’re a seabird… that isn’t waterproof and can’t swim… if they land in
the water, they’re at serious risk of drowning! (Their lack of water-resistant feathers helps with their agility, most-likely.) Anyway – while they can snatch
shallow-swimming prey out of the water, they seem to prefer to (and get at least 40% of their food from) stealing it from other birds, harassing them in-flight and snatching it from
their bills, or else attacking them until they throw up and grabbing their victim’s vomit as it falls. Nature is weird and amazing.
3 Time works differently here. If you schedule something, it’s more a guideline than it is
a timetable. When Ruth and I would try paddleboarding a few days later we turned up at the rental shack at their published opening time and hung out on the beach for most of an hour
before messaging the owners via the number on their sign. After 15 minutes we got a response that said they’d be there in 10 minutes. They got there 20 minutes later and opened their
shop. I’m not complaining – the beach was lovely and just lounging around in the warm sea air with a cold drink from a nearby bar was great – but I learned from the experience that if
you’re planning to meet somebody at a particular time here, you might consider bringing a book. (Last-minute postscript: while trying to arrange our next accommodation, alongside
writing this post, I was told that I’d receive a phone call “in half an hour” to arrange payment: that was over an hour ago…)
4 Come for the story of small-world serendipity; stay for the copious candid bird photos,
I guess?
6 Exceptionally-geeky footnote time. The correct currency symbol for the Trinidad & Tobago
Dollar is an S-shape with two vertical bars through it, which is not quite the same as the conventional S-shape with a single vertical bar that you’re probably used to seeing
when referring to e.g. American, Canadian, or Australian dollars. Because I’m a sucker for typographical correctness, I decided that I’d try to type it “the right way” here in my blog
post, and figured that Unicode had solved this problem for me: the single-bar dollar sign that’s easy to type on your keyboard inherits its codepoint from ASCII, I guessed, so the
double-bar dollar sign would be elsewhere in Unicode-space, right? Like how Unicode defines single-bar (pound) and double-bar (lira) variants of the “pound sign”. But it turns out this isn’t the case: the double-bar dollar sign, sometimes called
cifrão (from Portugese), and the single-bar dollar sign are treated as allographs: they
share the same codepoint and only the choice of type face differentiates between them. I can’t type a double-bar dollar sign for you without forcing an additional font upon
you, and even if I did it wouldn’t render “correctly” for everybody. Unicode is great, but it’s not perfect.
7 “Thank you very much”, in Welsh, but you probably knew that already.
The Nylon Pool is a sandbar in the Buccoo Reef, off the coast of Tobago. Despite the distance from the shore, it’s only about waist-deep. Truly mind-boggling.
My mum and I have been visiting Ireland on a geohashing & geocaching expedition. We’d spotted this shamrock shape but it wasn’t in our operating zone so we didn’t get a chance to hunt
any of them, until today’s journey up to Knock airport saw us take a comfort break nearby, and we figured we’d come find this cache, at least.
I’m at a crossroads. Literally, not figuratively.
Found this well-maintained cache with no difficulty at all: I thoroughly approve of a cache that is hidden just barely enough to not be muggled, but not so much as to inconvenience a
geocacher who’s sometimes in a hurry! Nice work, FP awarded. TFTC.
Despite having been hidden as recently as 2022, this “feels” like an old-school cache. A non-trivial offset, a real scramble through the terrain to find it, and a generous-sized
container at the other end. Back around 2010 many more caches felt like this, and in a way I miss them: being able to find a quick-and-easy traditional cache on every street corner is a
quick win, but it takes some of the satisfaction out of the old days when you’d expect an extended journey and hunt.
That said, our expedition to this cache was perhaps quite a lot harder than it needed to be. There’s a few reasons for that. The first reason is that we didn’t start out until the sun
was getting close to the horizon, which made searching for the first part hard and the second part – by which point we were using our phones as torches – extremely challenging. Another
challenge came from that first part, which was not where it ought to be: we found it on the floor, rather than hanging as indicated, some metres away from the correct location, and
having lost *both* of its NFC tags. Digging through the leaf litter eventually revealed one of the tags, and we’ve left it stacked with the board, but without being re-attached to its
tree it’s going to get lost again the next time the weather turns bad. Worth a look!
It took a long time to find our target at stage one. It took almost as long again to decode its data into a usable format.
The next challenge came from the encoding of the NFC tag. It’s possible to encode an NFC tag so that it says “this is text”, but the CO has encoded it to say “this is a URL”. As a
result, my phone insisted in trying to open the coordinates as a URL (stripping all space characters from it as it did so), leaving me to reverse-engineer it back to coordinates. And
then remembering how to convert my GPSr from DDM mode to Decimal so I could enter the coordinates in the right format. But I managed eventually. And wow: the CO wasn’t kidding when they
said this was on the opposite side of town!
My mum and I rushed across to the new location. Thankfully our first guess as to the place where we’d be able to park our car was correct, and we pressed on into the woods in the fading
light, tripping over branches and sploshing through streams as we tried to find out way by our phone torches alone. Getting close, we spiralled out, hunting for the cache. Eventually,
not helped by the hint (there are so many candidates!), and fearing our expedition at an untimely end, we hit the old logs, and found that the photo in log GL1A022W8 by macadonis to be
extremely helpful: even in the low light, we could see a hinted object and – after a little debate about which way we should be facing it – soon had the cache in hand. Hurrah!
We must’ve searched at the base of thirty or forty trees before we found the right one.
We signed the (proper size) log book and returned it as we found it. Thanks for a wonderful adventure; FP awarded for the effort that’s gone in to
making a cache that simultaneously felt both “modern” (with NFC tags) and “old school” (with the high effort-to-reward ratio, the challenging terrain, and the difficult hides). If stage
1 could be re-attached to its host and perhaps re-programmed to expose text, rather than URL, data, this cache could go from great to spectacular. TFTC!
