Caching around the world.

Two years ago we bought a GPS and learned about geocaching. We found out it was a great way to see the most beautiful spots we wouldn't have noticed without somebody making the effort of hiding a cache there. We saw some awesome new places in our own country, which is Holland, and even in our own town. We took the GPS over the border and used geocaching.com instead of a travelguide to find interesting places in Scotland, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Namibia.

In october 2010 we left the Netherlands to make a trip around the world. We took some sabbatical time from our jobs and we were allowed to take a leave for 6 months. Wow, what an opportunity to do some serious caching! We started in the USA, New England. Here we saw the beautiful fall foliage and had some great walks in the forests due to geocaching. Free wifi everywhere, so never a problem to search and log on our little laptop.

Next stop was in Fiji. Now here is a country with very few caches. But there are some, mostly made by tourists and we had great fun finding them. It gave us some special encounters with the local people, like the priest who thought we had a spiritual experience with an old tree while we were only looking for a cache under its trunks.

New Zealand had so many caches! Sometimes it was hard to choose but we managed. We even found a cache especially made for us, arranged by our dutch friends at home and a local cacher, which was quite a suprise! Earthcaches showed us the way to remarkable places, we saw vulcanoes, glaciers, desolated beaches and unknown viewpoints.

Now we are in Australia for three months. Travelling around by campervan in this beautiful country. We did some citycaching in Sydney and found the nice walk from coogeebeach to bondibeach. We saw our first wild wallabies in Queensland thanks to a cache. We had a great afternoon in Bowen, which we would have skipped otherwise. We had to drive 5000 km through the outback due to the floodings in Queensland, caching made it less boring. And now we are in Victoria and we saw very beautiful wild coastlines, empty beaches with great tidalpools and heaps of wildlife, like koalas and kangaroos. We have 5 more weeks to go and we're heading for Perth. After that we have a week in Hongkong and than it's back to the real life again.

It will be spring in Europe when we get home in April, a very nice time to walk, hike and bike. Geocaching will still be a part of our lives. It's a great way of having some extra excercise and seeing beautiful places in the meantime. We thank all the people for putting those caches out there!

Greetings from the Netherlands,

Marieke and Michiel (team 'Kiekejan')
email: marieke_michiel@yahoo.com