Readers of my previous posts may remember that I have a low-level obsession with interesting geocaching statistics and related achievements. One that I’ve recently given some attention to is the location of my most northerly, southerly, easterly and westerly geocache finds. It’s rare these days that I get the chance to nudge one of these four points any futher away from home, but a recent holiday did just that, and got me thinking about my caching experiences at the four ‘corners’ of the Earth.
Northern Soul
A long-awaited holiday in Iceland with my grown-up daughters presented me with an opportunity to add several hundred miles to my furthest north cache. The previous holder of that title had been in Calton Hill, Edinburgh. I used to spend a lot of time in the highlands but that was mostly before caching and my only other trips to Scotland had been to the Ayshire Mega in 2014 or other trips to Edinburgh.
We’d decided that the best way to see all the main sites was to sign up for a series of guided coach tours. These included one of the rugged south coast and another to the thermally-heated Blue Lagoon, but the one which would perhaps help me with this particular endeavour was the so-called Golden Circle. The Golden Circle (not circular) is a loop of dramatic, fasinating and very touristy locations, all within an hour or so from Reykjavik itself, where we were based. The Golden Circle also took in an area slightlly further north than the capital, and so presented the perfect opportunity.
The cache which turned out to be my most northern find on this trip was an EarthCache at the incredible Gullfoss, a two-step waterfall on the river Hvítá. The weather was, by UK standards at least, pretty fierce on the day of our visit, and so we didn’t hang around! Down to the lower falls for obervations and a selfie, the back up and upsteam a bit for the same at the upper falls- job done. Making the necessary observations was quite a challenge in these conditions though, and so so further research was necessary later on. It was only back at the hotel that evening that I realised that this incredible place had now become my most northerly find!
The Beautiful South
It was on my visits to Malawi and Zambia a decade ago, that I first met Kelly who was working in Livingstone for the same charity that I was volunteering for. We hit it off immediately and would meet up and often go caching whenever she was home in the UK. In 2018 I went out to stay with her for a fortnight and, between helping in schools and generally exploring, we did a spot of caching. This was very generous of her as she had already done almost all of the caches in the area!
To get a decent haul, we decided to head over the bridge at the nearby Victoria Falls into neighbouring Zimbabwe and the town of Victoria Falls itself. Parking up on the Zambia side, we then walked over the bridge, through the border control and into Zimbabwe. This is, I think, the only time I’ve walked from one country to another!
At the time Kelly had a cache on the bridge itself, and I’d held a WWFM event (with no attendees!) there a few days earlier. However, venturing into Zimbabwe meant going slightly further south, and among the handful of caches we visited that day, the one which turned out to be the most southerly was the first one we did, another EarthCache concerning the down-river gorge below the falls themselves.
Again, it was only later that I realised that was the closest I’d so far been to the South Pole. It’s also worth noting that both my most northerly and southerly finds are, coincidentally, both EarthCaches and both at waterfalls!
East is East
I’m not going to dwell too much on this one, as it is the subject of a post all of its own. Suffice to say that it involved a hooker, her pimp, a bemused rickshaw driver and a very nervous cacher! It’s also the only one of these four caches which I deliberately set out to find just for this reason. Sadly the cache is now archived, the only one of my compass point caches with this status.
How the West Was Won
Finally, the tale of my most westerly find to date. I was on a family holiday to Florida in the spring of 2007, having been persuaded by my then wife, and later my very excited kids, that I’d definitely love it, despite my misgivings about the hyper-reality, fakery and captitalism of a theme-park holiday. (Note: I loved every minute of it, especially our visit to the Kennedy Space Centre!) This is still the only trip I’ve made to the USA and next time I hope to see more of the landscape.
What’s unusual about this find is that it was actually some years after our visit that I actually realised that I’d ‘found’ this Virtual and logged it. At the time, I had only just started caching a few months before, and wasn’t yet tuned in to the opportunities for logging caches when travelling. I did find a physical cache, a lamp-post cache in a Wall-Mart car park, but that was it.
Around ten years later, while idly looking at caches in places I’d previously visited, that a spotted a number of Virtuals at the main theme parks in the Orlando area. Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and also this one at the Animal Kingdom. For each of them, all that was required was a selfie at the coordinates. We’d taken hundreds of pictures, incluidng these three locations. But was this before I’d started caching? Nope, I was a newbie for sure, but definitely a cacher by then. Were these Virtuals published by the time I visited? Yes they were! So, even though it was a decade before I noticed, I could legitimately claim these three Virtuals! One of them, Animal Kingdom, was slightly more to the north than the others, thus becoming my fourth ‘corner’ of the world!
A F Wright 24/10/24
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