Getting lost with GPS

I ought to apologise publicly to Paul Janman, who is in the East Coast village of Nuhaka this weekend for the Wairoa Maori Film Festival. Paul is helping make a documentary film about the festival, which attracts auteurs and activists from around Aotearoa and the South Pacific, and I had agreed to head down with him and live blog some of the action in the improvised movie theatre that is Nuhaka's Kahungungu marae. Last week's diving temperatures, though, spread a variety of maladies, from nerve pain to the common cold to croup, through our family, and have made the prospect of a journey across the cold central plateau of Te Ika a Maui unappealing. 

I hope to appease Paul by spending some of the weekend visiting the geocaches that he, Ian Powell, and I have hidden up and down the Great South Road as part of our contribution to the A Sense of Place exhibition at the Papakura Art Gallery. A week or so ago Paul placed the GPS coordinates for the caches, as well as some justifications for their peculiar contents, on the website where New Zealand devotees of geocaching congregate. Cache-hunters haven't taken long to find, plunder, and replenish our treasure boxes.

Digital technologies in general, and digital mapping devices in particular, have been criticised for alienating twenty-first century humans from their surroundings. Technosceptics like Nicholas Carr allege that innovations like Google Maps and GPS tracking are removing the complexity and mystery from both natural landscapes and cityscapes, and replacing the circuitous, adventurous journeys we used to make through the world with swift, efficient passages from one point to another. Instead of wandering around unfamiliar environments gazing this way and that, and asking bemused strangers for directions, we now walk confidently forward staring down at our smartphones, which lead us infallibly to the location of our next appointment.

I was for some time sympathetic to the arguments of Carr and his co-thinkers, and I still don't own a cellphone. But the geocaching community which has emerged recently in New Zealand and several other nations suggests to me that digital mapping and tracking can be a means for us to become better acquainted with, rather than more alienated from, our surroundings. Geocachers seem to enjoy the way their hobby sends them hurrying off to fragments of the world - scruffy parks, half-reclaimed garbage dumps, half-demolished buildings, the sunless undersides of bridges, abandoned military bases, and so on - that they would never otherwise visit. 

When they spotted the GPS locations and site descriptions that Paul placed on their website, the geocachers raced each other to reach our stashes, recorded their visits in the logbooks we had left, and replaced our treasures with their own objects and texts. They have also recounted their adventures online, in the sort of truncated, jargon-riddled sentences that the adepts of other esoteric disciplines, like mountaineering, chess, and tai chi, also favour. Here is a geocacher's account of a visit to Conifer Grove, the almost sublimely banal South Auckland community where Paul and I had found a niche underneath a bridge at the edge of a bleak park: 

Got woken up by the notifications coming through this morning...figured id go and find these new caches. Headed to the first and spotted MrRUSH742 already at GZ. A quick look around and we had the cache in hand. A joint FTF for our early morning efforts...Mitsimadman and Stik-a-crane arrived. A brief chat with them before we headed off to the next one. TFTC!

Borrowing the rather unsympathetic word that Harry Potter and his mates use for humans not initiated into magic, another geocacher spoke of having to hide from some 'Muggles' during a search for one of the boxes Paul and I had stashed. 

The cache that Paul and Ian left in the deindustrialised zone known as Southdown, close to the burnt-out Affco freezing works, has been visited less often that the other boxes we stashed beside the Great South Road. One of the geocachers who did make it to Southdown explained why: 

was very hesitant I must admit. I'm very glad the cache is located close to the entrance...This reserve has something of a reputation. It is a known gay cruising/pickup/casual sex area...Thankfully my happy ending was just an FTF and I didn't see anyone else in the park, but there were plenty of cars parked outside include a few guys sitting in their cars 'waiting' {FTF} #1513 TFTC!

Another cache-hunter made hard work of finding a box hidden close to the Bombay Obelisk, that sacred monument of New Zealand's white supremacists:

pretty much knew how to get to this spot. how wrong I was. I got some strange looks from the motorway cars as I walked inside the barrier to GZ. I had thoughts that a police car would stop and take me away. I tried going through the bush but could not find a way. co ords were fairly accurate for me and it was a quick FTF #52 for this old fella. I must admit I took the short cut back through the long grass. TFTC I took nothing. signed the log a little after 9.00 a.m.

I think that, after all his trouble, the old fella could at least have helped himself to one of the Nazi toy soldiers we'd left in the Bombay cache.

Perhaps Nicholas Carr should take up geocaching. The hobby might show him, as it has shown me, that digital mapping and tracking devices have the potential, if they are used mischievously enough, to complicate and re-enchant the landscapes around us. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]