Geocaching holidays, courses & breaks

What are Geocaching and Letterboxing?

Geocaching can be best described as a hi-tech outdoor treasure hunt using GPS (Global Positioning System) devices; either a dedicated GPS receiver or, increasingly these days, GPS enabled smartphones.

 

The aim is to find hidden containers at specific locations using a combination of the GPS, maps and other navigation aids. At most Geocache locations there will be some form of waterproof container (the 'geocache' or 'cache') tucked away or hidden. Inside this there will typically be a logbook for recording the find and often various types of 'treasure' or 'swag' (in the form of inexpensive toys, trinkets, coins etc.) these can be traded by taking one item and replacing it with another. Some of these are trackable items whose journey is logged and followed online as they are moved from cache to cache – Travel Bugs and Geocoins are examples of these types of 'hitchhiker'.

 

Geocaching takes place right across the globe and cache coordinates can be picked up from various websites, the largest of which is Geocaching.com. Other sites of use are The Geocaching Association of Great Britain (GAGB) for UK cachers, and an nice top 10 selection from the National Trust here.

 

Geocaching holidays and courses

Geocaching is the sort of activity that's easy to organise yourself and fit into a holiday or vacation wherever you are in the world; but there are a few companies offering organised geocaching holidays and courses, or facilitating the activity for holiday guests – it is these that we are listing in this section.

 

Letterboxing

Letterboxing is very similar to Geocaching and is credited with being its inspiration. The original letterboxes were on Dartmoor, but now they can be found Worldwide. The letterbox is a small container in which you'll find a rubber stamp and a visitors book. The boxes are hidden and written clues lead players to its location. Clues can simply be a map reference, but can also sometimes be more cryptic. When a letterbox is found, the player stamps their own record as well as leaving a personal print in the visitors book. Dartmoor Letterboxing and Atlas Quest, Letterboxing Community are a couple of good sites for more details.

 

 

Other similar treasure hunting activities

Cistes are hidden boxes of 'treasure', very similar to geocaches.

Munzees scavenger hunts are smart phone powered and use discoverable QR codes hidden in locations around the world.
Waymarking indexes unique worldwide locations and uses GPS data to locate them, they are indexed in waymark categories such as animals, buildings, history, etc.