Cache Me If You Can

Discovering Bengaluru on a Techie Treasure Hunt

- Hema Ramaprasad

The thrill of finding your first geocache is a bit like walking through a wall at King’s Cross Station in London, and emerging on the magical Platform 9¾. It opens up a whole new dimension that didn’t exist until that moment. When I first pluck out a magnetic thumbnail sized nano cache after searching in the same place for what seems like hours, I am amazed that it had managed to elude me all this time. It looks like a metallic nut and has a rolled-up log sheet inside that I fill up. I should have found it a lot sooner, considering I have been to Lalbagh, a 240-acre park in south Bengaluru, more than a thousand times since I was a child. But that’s the beauty of geocaching—it forces you to look at familiar neighbourhoods and landscapes with fresh eyes. The sweeping arc of a tree branch. That signboard you never noticed. The sculpture that became a blind spot. The art deco bungalow with a shady garden. That view of the city you’d forgotten.

But for all my newbie enthusiasm, it turns out I am about 16 years late to the geocaching party; the first geocache was planted in 2000. A friend introduced me to it a few months ago, around the time when Pokemon Go was all the rage. He claimed Geocaching was a better game. I just had to get outside and explore using a combination of geographical coordinates, hints, and my phone’s GPS to track down “caches” listed on the Geocaching website and mobile app.