Nano caching?

29 May 2006

Kyunggido, South Korea

Nano caching, among other things.

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Spent the day cacheboxing today. Nothing out of the ordinary except we were back near our old neighborhood. So, exploring that area after 7-8 years was neat. Our goal was to hike & explore until we dropped but we had to take a 70km drive down to the area before that was to happen.

We found the first cache box without a hitch. Stumbled on these beautiful roses along the way. Korea is definitely rose territory! I remember tending to the dozen rose bushes we had in front of my office building when we lived here previously. One Fall, a co-worker hacked the roses back to almost smithereens as a way to burn off some steam. Most other coworkers were convinced that the roses wouldn't bounce back in the Spring. The man who 'pruned' the roses transferred to another location so he missed out on the beauty he created. His ueber pruning on the bushes caused one of the most incredible rose displays I've ever seen. There were some roses that were about 8" across--reds, yellows, pinks, whites--the array of colors was gorgeous and their scent was amazing! Walking past these roses on the way to the cachebox reminded me of that awesome spring rose garden!

Our first hunt took us to a Korean military monument that was recently built in our old neighborhood. We found the cachebox here with little difficulty. Turned out it was a large LockNLock container that had been spray painted in matte brown & green camo stripes and blended in really well with its surroundings. The paint scratched off a bit in spots but it still served well to camouflage the large container.

Another area we discovered was a new park built a few miles from our old home. I'm pretty sure the area had just been some rice-paddies but visiting it today you'd never believe it! They'd added a couple of large duck ponds, rolling hills, an arboretum, rose gardens, hydrophyte garden and many other unique features we unfortunately were not able to explore. You see, when we arrived at the park it was closed for some reason. We could see past the gate guards that folks were meandering around the trails, enjoying picnics and other things folks do at parks. When the sentries wouldn't let us pass we were pretty dismayed. After awhile we realized we'd come all this way and didn't want to be so close and yet so far. So, through very broken Korean we explained our situation and how we'd only need 10 minutes in the park; they permitted us to enter. Then it was a mad dash to reach the cache box, snap a few photos at the lake and return to the gate. Somehow we managed to do it (don't ask me how--because I'm still not sure how we did it so quickly).

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From there we headed over to another cachebox that wasn't terribly exciting--then hit a 4th one. This one was supposed to be a hollow fake rock as displayed in the online logbook photos. We were pretty pumped to get an opportunity to actually hunt out and see a fake rock hiding container as we hadn't seen any like that besides the giant fake landscaping rock we'd visited a month before in downtown Seoul. When we reached the location in which it was supposed to be hidden (we could tell using some basic photo analysis) we were unable to find any fake rock. :( We scoured and scoured--then radiated from 'the' tree out around the extremely steep slope and still didn't find it. What we did find though was--3 coconut shells, a straight line of empty Soju (hard liquor) bottles in 1m increments leading away from the tree, a full bottle of Soju stashed in plastic bag and tucked in another hidey hole further up the hill, a recently dug Korean military fighting position (the dirt was still fresh!) about 8' from 'the' tree but still no fake rock cache-anywhere.

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So, our imaginations started to run wild. The soldiers who built the bunker got a few minutes of downtime. One of their derelict buds (or their superiors--who knows?) had stashed a dozen bottles of Soju off on the side. When the cat was away it certainly looked like they got to play.... Then in their drunken Soju stupor one of the guys squatted by the tree and noticed the very obvious fake rock casually hidden at its base. He grabbed it, realized it was fake and either took it home with him as a neat trinket or tossed it as far down the steep slope as his drunken state would allow. Or at least that's what we think happened. For all we know the cache could still be there--it just didn't seem to be in that grid square.

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After a good hour or so of hunting & pecking around the grid square we were pretty convinced it was missing. After our many 'failed' attempts at finding GCs in Asia because they just seem to wander off pretty easily around here we'd started carrying some GC repair supplies with us. So we decided to help the owner out and replace the cache while we were there--not knowing if the owner was still in the area or not. We found that one of the coconuts that we had found was hollow and it was the right size in which to hide our small LB container. Perfect camouflage! The only problem, however, is that coconuts are not native to Korea! So, we had to add some natural camouflage around the area to make it less noticeable. Here's a photo of our coconut shell 'hide':

Can you crack this nut?

Here's a photo of the container and the coconut shell behind it. Surrounding it are the 7 travel bugs and 1 geocoin we have on hand to return to the US shortly. This is our first coconut 'hide'. ;)

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Our next hunt was quite a bit different and really the only reason why I am even posting this rather boring day of GCing entry in the first place.

Can you see the geocache in this picture?

No, it's not the plastic bag full of travel bugs that rnrB is holding. trkr actually has it & the log in his hand! It's smaller than a penny! More like the size of a watch battery!!! This nano cache is by far the smallest cache we've ever found. Before this our smallest had been a 'listerine breath strip' container holding a LB Hitchhiker in it named "Pocket Change" that the 7Nails hid about 3-1/2 years ago.

Finally, a garlic truck we passed along the street in our neighborhood in Seoul. It was piled high with garlic bulbs--and yet another thing we don't ever see in the US.