Bangalore: With Bangalore’s environs getting more and more disturbed, thanks to the numerous construction works and digging activity in the name of development and drainage, there are one set of minority adventurists within and abroad, who are a worried lot. They are known as Geocachers. And their passion is to hunt for treasures hidden by people in their community, the Geocaching community.
With most places seeing more and more activity, these people and their treasures are often lost, spoiling the sport. “The micro-cache that I placed seems to have gone missing and this has happened for the second time, primarily due to new constructions in the Garden city. Having seen the first two caches vandalised last year, I have decided to put microcaches, which hopefully will stay,” says a geocacher.
An outdoor recreational activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called ‘geocaches’ or ‘caches’, anywhere in the world, the sport has seen increasing popularity in the western world. In India the number is miniscule, but is seeing some activity thanks to the efforts of a few geocachers. With a standard website in place, www.geocaching.com, acting as the sole authority for these geocachers, the community number in the city is very small.
“Active members from Bangalore number not more than three or four,” says Harshavardhana Bhat, an active geocacher in Bangalore who has had a ‘pretty awesome’ experience with geocaching and successfully found 13 caches so far. He says, “The awareness about geocaching is quite less in the country. In India, the number of geocachers would be few tens. The whole western world, Korea, Japan etc have many geocachers and if you look at the map in the geocaching website, all these countries are filled with caches. Bangalore has seven caches, including two of mine.”
Harsha, who got into geocaching when he learnt it from a German colleague on a trip to Germany, has been able to find three caches in Bangalore and since the geocaching principle is ‘take some stuff, leave some stuff’, Harsha suggests that people can start with the locations where he has been successful and has left something there in place of what he had found. “May be Lalbagh cache or bridge under troubled water, near old airport road or around Ulsoor can be tried to start with. If you have a GPS enabled phone, download ‘c:geo’ application on android or any free geocaching application on to the iphone or just any navigation app. All you need to do is go to the co-ordinates, follow the description as well as the hints and then search,” he says.
If you are planning to take up this sport and want to find a safe place to hide your cache, try the numerous garbage that are piled up in many parts of the city. They are there to safely remain untouched for quite sometime, given the current attitude of BBMP.
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