The first time Ro Giblin tried geocaching, she couldn’t find the cache because it was hidden under a very realistic-looking cow pat.
Since then, she has logged 14,000 finds, discovering caches in obscure places locally and around the globe. It has taken her off the beaten track near Barcelona and away from the tourist hordes in Cinque Terre, Italy.
Geocaching is a real-world outdoor treasure hunt which is all about tracing the coordinates of a hidden cache - and they are pretty much everywhere. Thousands of caches are hidden around the Top of the South, waiting for the next geocacher to find them and log the find on their app.
Last weekend, local geocachers held a letterbox rogaine event, where pretend letterboxes were tucked away for competitors to hunt out. On Labour Weekend in October, the Top of the South hosts New Zealand’s national geocaching event, which will attract geocachers from across the globe.
Ro has been geocaching since 2009, and for her, the appeal was exploring new places by using “latitude and longitude”.
“It makes you get out and exercise and explore, which I love doing anyway. But this tells you where to go. There might be a cache at the top of Barnicoat, but there are some all the way up there as well – they’ve multiplied.”
Geocachers download the geocaching app and use the coordinates of a cache to seek it out, which, as Ro found out with the cow pat, can be hard to find. She says it’s a great family activity that can be around town or up a mountain. For an added challenge, geocachers can choose to solve a puzzle before they can even begin to find the coordinates.
“It gets you off the beaten track. My favourite example was a town in Cinque Terre where five huge busloads of people from the cruise ship were a mass of people walking past the locals. And there was a cache there, so I got to see what the place was really like and had this interaction with a local who told me where it was.”
Top of the South Cachefest 2026 will be based at Hope Hall, where geocaching games, seminars and activities will take place during the long weekend. One of the larger events will be a geocaching Rogaine event, where teams will be given a map and cache locations at the start time.
In the meantime, local geocachers have had a display board at Richmond Library and plan another information session later this month.
