The Worlds Largest Treasure Hunt - Geocaching

I'm so excited to write about an enjoyable and fun way to get into fitness while exploring the world around you.

Coach Ben from @healthsquared has started a six week health & fitness challenge, this week encourages everyone to go out for a long walk (or run) and write a post/take some images describing the adventures encountered. As he stated walking is free and has a huge list of associated benefits.

Walking is also a fantastic way to start any fitness regime and was the way my husband @shai-hulud and I started. We started walking about four years ago after some friends went on holiday with us to Brisbane and we walked and we explored. We were exhausted but we felt better within ourselves after just one week of physical activity.

Upon returning home we decided to continue our newly started habit. At first, just around the block with the our lowered dog, Pia and then we found a local hike less than 5 minutes drive away that actually has its own waterfall and two caves. The latter we would have had no idea existed without exploring the world of geocaching. So may be surprised at some of the amazing places your feet can take you and the habits they can create.

Even now four years on we still go for a long walk or hike most weeks, rarely going back to the same place unless we have a particular fondness for it all thanks to geocaching. You may think that we have to travel far and wide to find new places but you would be wrong, that's the best thing about it, you don't need too, you can find treasures in your own backyard. OK, not literally your backyard as there is no trespassing allowed in geocaching but you know what I mean. As for those with more wide spreading reach geocaching is worldwide and so when visiting other countries we always check out the app to see what caches are around our holiday destination.

Why as grown adults would we want to spend our time hunting treasures you may ask?

Like walking geocaching can be done for free, there is a premium app available which opens more caches but the free app will give you more than enough places to start exploring. Now treasure hunts may seem childish but... Who am I kidding? I love a good treasure hunt! However, that aspect is only one side to it and not the initial reason we chose to check it out. To be honest the treasure swaps can sometimes be a bit average, not to say some awesome things can't be swapped for but there are also things called travel bugs and coins. These are transferred as part of the hunt, picked up from one geocache, logged out of the cache on the app and transferred to another to be logged in again, with any luck in a timely manner, making it's way around the world. This can be tracked by the initial cache owner and anyone that has helped it on its journey, you are encouraged to take photos and share their adventures with those following.

Take Goofy up the top, he started in Tennessee, USA in 2013 visiting many states before jumping the boarder to Canada. Next he took a flight stopping in Hawaii prior to landing in Australia trekking up and down the east coast, even visiting good old Tassie. Being Aussie's you think we would have found him in Australia right, nope, from Australia he then went onto Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Thailand, where we picked him up bringing him back to Australia, where he is currently exploring our beautiful south west region. How amazing is that?

Screenshots of the Geocache App in use.

Left Two: Images of caches to be found in our local capital city. Middle: Where we found Goofy. Right Two: Nature hikes we found less than 15 minutes away.

The possibilities are endless and that is why we love it so much. It turned our repetitive walks into something we cherished again showing us places that we never new existed like those awesome caves I mentioned earlier as well as teaching and challenging us along the way.

Various views from Ellis Brook Valley Reserve, our favorite go to hike and where the caves can be found.

When in nature, wildlife is never far away as can be seen in many of these images. Be it ducks, wallaby's or butterflies, I love them all. Yes I even appreciate the snakes although am very wary during the summer months. You stay away from them, they will generally stay away from you. Spiders on the other hand are an issue, I'm not sure how many spider webs, yes including the odd spider I have walked into when hiking. They are near impossible to spot at some times of the day.

How can a walk teach us something?

Besides carry sticks when walking to avoid the girly screams and associated "get it off" me spider web dances.... There are multiple cache types, you have the traditional caches (green single cache) and special caches, all identified by their symbol on the cache. Above you can see some examples of these, the blue "?" mark a mystery cache. To get the GPS coordinates for these caches you must solve a puzzle. There are also multi caches (orange double cache) which require you to find all caches in the group prior to finding the main cache. This is by no means an exhaustive list but one other really interesting cache type are the earth caches (earth cut to the core image - not seen on images below) which does not have a physical cache as the unique geological location is the cache.

Here some images from a small handful the walks/hikes we have found due to geocaching. The first set of pictures are from a place so close to us it could have bitten us if it were a snake and we had no idea it existed until searching for new places to hike through the geocaching app.

I was amazed to find the left side completely stagnant and the other flowing freely, the difference in growth amount and colour was evident as you can see.

Maybe there's a moral to that story, keep moving or stop growing but even amongst all that decay something thrives.

And a hop skip and a jump from the creek is a field full of mandarin trees for the public to take when ripe. All within 15 minutes walk from home.

Drive just another 10 minutes east from here and you have another fantastic spot to explore complete with log bridge.

Earlier last year we had a wedding in Victoria to go too, I'm initially from Victoria so we hired a car and took the long drive too my hometown. We were in no rush so we took it slow and explore via geocaching on the trip, again the places we found and the things we saw were amazing.

After trekking down this steep, yet breathtaking in more than one way pathway, we stumbled onto the beach. Unfortunately after thirty minutes of searching we couldn't' find the geocache and it was another thirty minute hike back up to the car so we had to register a "did not find"(blue sad face) and move on but it was worth it for the views.

This gem we found off the side of the freeway, it was a 15 minute round trip easy walk. We found many of these along the way, some more challenging than others. It not only made our trip more enjoyable but we saw more of Victoria then we would have if we just drove there and back. Plus we got some exercise and it broke up the long car drive, win win!

To find out more about geocaching check out this short video.