High-tech Hide and Seek
For a new breed of adventurer, the ancient rock-cut city of Petra has treasures to unearth – and all that’s needed to find them is a GPS receiver
WORDS MIKE MACEACHERAN
JORDANIAN FADI HRIMAT IS A TREASURE HUNTER. Not the kind you might envisage, with an Indiana Jones-style fedora and bullwhip. He travels light with just a smartphone and a good sense of direction. That’s because Hrimat is a tech treasure hunter or geocacher, as his fellow enthusiasts call him. ‘I got my first GPS five years ago and I was hooked,’ he says. ‘This is the closest thing you can get to real treasure hunting.’
Invented by a GPS fanatic from Oregon in the United States, geocaching has become a worldwide game. The original idea was simple: hide a container out in the woods and note the coordinates with a GPS unit. The treasure-seeker would then have to locate the container with only the use of a GPS receiver.
With the rise of smartphones, the activity has now gone global as a live social-media activity. There are more than five million registered geocachers, and they have downloaded the official app onto their phones to find capsules hidden in 100 countries. At the latest count, there are over 1.5 million active geocaches worldwide – there’s even one hidden in Antarctica. The rules haven’t changed that much either: geocachers simply need to write about their find in the logbook hidden inside each capsule, and log their experience online at geocaching.com. ‘When I started, there were only about 20 in Jordan, so I decided to go and hide some caches myself,’ says 31-year-old Hrimat. ‘Now there are nearly 70.’
Regarded as the Middle East’s godfather of geocaching, Hrimat’s first successful expedition was to Ajloun Castle in Jordan with his wife. ‘Until that moment, neither of us really understood what geocaching was, or knew what to expect,’ he says. ‘After finding our first cache, it gave me such a rush that I fell in love with it. I wanted to find every one in Jordan.’ Bitten by the bug, he ticked off the lowest cache on earth at the Dead Sea and several hidden in the Dana Nature Reserve. He has since created his own trail across the country, hiding dozens of his own caches for other treasure-seekers to find.
Partly thanks to his efforts, Jordan is now regarded as the best place in the world to go tech treasure hunting. It is ideal terrain, with its Crusader castles, ancient Roman ruins, and deep ravines and wadis. Then there is Petra, the rose-red city of the Nabataeans in the south, where – appropriately enough – Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail in his last crusade. Six geocaches are dotted among its temples and tombs, with one of the country’s best stashed at the base of the Monastery, the largest monument on the site.
‘Geocaching lets people get off the beaten track, so they can experience a part of a country that they might not visit otherwise,’ says Hrimat. ‘It encourages people to share their own experience with hundreds of others that were there before them – it helps connect the world.’
[01] Our modern-day treasure hunter arrives, gets his GPS bearings, notes position and logs his co-ordinates.
[02] He proceeds along the Outer Siq past the Street of Facades, attention firmly on his iPhone.
[03] Reaches the High Place of Sacrifice where the first cache is hidden. Remembers to admire the views.
[04] The GPS reads that the cache is now within a 100-metre range. But where exactly?
[05] Check the GPS again: it reads N30˚19.200 E035˚26.873. The first cache is a metre away!
[06] Spot something among the rocks and fumble around. Eureka! The GPS works and the treasure is revealed…
[07] …as a film canister. When opened it contains a logbook, pencil and sharpener.
[08] Our would-be Indiana Jones adds to the log and returns the cache to its hiding place. Next!
