Not Found: GC1CGQM “What is that Thing?”

What is that Thing? is one in a series of cleverly-positioned geocaches by “bainsworld” inspired by the film The Matrix (1999).  This movie was filmed in various locations in Sydney, and the bainsworld cache locations takes you back to those locations.

What is that Thing? is from a well recognised scene in the movie, located underneath an stone arched railway overpass which just happens to be a 3 minute walk from my work. I had some time this morning, so I couldn’t really resist the temptation to wander down there for a brief look and to see if I could locate this nearby micro cache.

One needs to practice the art of stealth here! Although it’s not a very high pedestrian activity area, there is a moderate and steady volume of slow-moving, stop-start vehicular traffic passing by, and a police centre nearby with a number of Federal Police cars parked on the street in the immediate area. It is also near the railway tunnel entrance to the city circle underground, and hence is a security hotspot.

Today I was armed only with my iPhone to get a fix on the coordinates. Unfortunately – it didn’t like the built up area and I couldn’t get a proper satellite fix. Despite this, however, I was still able to use the GeoCaching application on the iPhone to look up the cache and get a pinpoint on the Google satellite view which lead me to an area where the cache should be. 

I eventually located a small, sharpened pencil – only 4cm in length, resting quietly on a stone ledge – as if to indicate nearby geocaching activity, but sadly I did not find the actual geocache itself.

This one will need to wait another day.

Shopping for Caching Supplies

Geocaching is a sport or hobby that you can spend as much or little money on as you choose.

For example – you don’t really need a GPSR to find a traditional cache. As long as you have access to a computer you can easily make use of online tools like Google Maps, with satellite view and street view to locate a GZ (Ground Zero). In fact, Adventures in Geocaching recently wrote an article called Geocaching Without a GPS on this very issue.

But technology is just the start of caching – there’s the containers, the tradeables items, the trinkets and stuff – the general rule when trading is to always leave something of equal or greater value.

Thankfully – again, with some imagination – this can be a cheap (or even free) exercise. Caches themselves do not have to be special containers. You don’t need to buy an “official” cache box to be a player. We’ve seen caches made from used containers that would otherwise be discarded as rubbish – so yes, a lot of the everyday stuff in your life that you throw out can be useful in the world of caching.

And what about the trinkets – try unused or unwanted kids toys and stuff. Or cheap stuff that you can pick up at markets – but again, you shouldn’t need to spend too much money.

We’ve made a decision to stick to a budget with our new hobby – yes we can buy a few bits and pieces, but lets be sensible, and we found the best place to buy supplies is from a discount shop (known colloquially in Australia as a $2 shop). Thankfully there’s three of these in town for us to choose from.

Here we found some super-cheap goodies – including small notepads which will fit nicely into our caches as logbooks, a pack of 4 cheap pencils that we’ll cut up to make 12 short pencils from, and a few cache containers. The shop also had an array of interesting little trinkets we can use as trades – such as little coloured stars, ornamental stones, and the like.

All up we spent $20 on quite a lot of stuff to set up a few caches and keep us going for about 6 months, so hopefully as soon as next weekend we’ll have our first caches out there waiting to be found!