Why am I writing this?
I like geocaching, that “digital scavenger hunt” where someone hides a tin and posts the clues on the internet about how to find it. It always gives you a reason to get outdoors and you visit places you would never have visited without geocaching. In the best case, very special ones.
One of the things I like best about this are the puzzles. Be it the mystery caches, for which you have to puzzle out a coordinate already at home, or the stations of a multi, i.e. a multi-station cache, where a brainteaser prevents you from going further. Some of these tasks follow certain recurring patterns. Although much of it is packaged differently, the basic features are similar. Sometimes in the ciphers (e.g. binary or Morse) or in the techniques, for example to hide more information in pictures or music files.
If you want to solve such a mystery yourself, you first have to find out how it works, what everything is. And anyone who has ever heard, read or applied such a thing must also remember it again at that particular moment.
For such situations and persons (myself 😉 ) I started this blog section and will keep adding to it over time.
You find this blog idea reprehensible? A mystery-solving blog for all the copycats, mystery coordinate swappers, phone joker users and similarly disagreeable people? You still have to solve everything yourselves and therefore find this writing terribly unfair? No, that’s not it at all, hardly at all. Everything that is written here can also be found on the net in various forums, blogs, on Twitter, Facebook and via various search engines, and is exchanged at the latest at events like the famous Panini pictures. By the way, you can often find detailed solutions to special caches. Or even the final coordinates.
I will not present individual caches here and describe the solution paths based on them. And even with the knowledge and use of the ideas and strategies explained here, solving a mystery is still manual and above all mental work. You have to understand and implement the mystery idea yourself, the puzzles are often interlocked, you have to recognise the coordinates when they are in front of you. And you have to practise a lot, as with everything in life. Pursue a lot of abstruse thoughts, whereas the solution is often much easier than your own thoughts. Many mysteries can’t be pressed into a solution scheme anyway, every single cache owner has different, sometimes confused, sometimes ingenious, often unique ideas on how to hide coordinates, clues or text. And with many mysteries, the solution is clear anyway and it only takes a little effort to work it out. Through web research, through the time-consuming filling in of certain matrices, through solving logic puzzles for which there often doesn’t even seem to be an online solution tool on the big, bad internet. Or by finding another cache or travel bug. So anyone who hoped to be able to wipe every mystery off the map with a few clicks after reading this blog may now close the website disappointed. Just because you know how a Sudoku works doesn’t mean you can solve one. Let alone do it quickly.
With that in mind, I wish you much fun and hopefully witty insights on my blog.
Nina