collecting countries

[+colleda]

On 11/14/2024 at 6:58 PM, colleda said:

After a sea day from Argostoli, where the wind and rain did not let up, I am now in Messina. Messenia has had buckets of rain this last 48 hours enough to damage roads and the ship has cancelled all its tours. I did not have a tour booked here so, again, I will wait it out for an improvement in the weather. There are only a few trads close to the port.

Tomorrow we call in to Naples. I have a private, non-ship, tour booked taking in the Amalfi, coast, Pompeii and Sorrento. May be able to grab a couple more then.

All good intentions ruined.

Struck down with Norovirus and spent a good part of the day in the ship's medical centre on i/v drips.

Have lost 4kgs and still recovering (at home now).

Edited November 21, 2024 by colleda

[+Goldenwattle]

13 minutes ago, colleda said:

All good intentions ruined.

Struck down with Norovirus and spent a good part of the day in the ship's medical centre on i/v drips.

Have lost 4kgs and still recovering (at home now).

That's disappointing. I hope you are well on the way to recovery.

[+colleda]

On 11/21/2024 at 1:05 PM, Goldenwattle said:

That's disappointing. I hope you are well on the way to recovery.

Thanks. I'm finally be able to eat again. Spent 20 hours flying home in Business Class and not able to eat the food. Now I have to overcome my jet lag.

Just noticed a moment ago that I hit 40 country milestone.

 

[+Smitherington]

I also hope you recuperate quickly and I’m glad you can still notice and celebrate another milestone reached.

[+kusunflower]

I am going to be in Budapest, Hungary in the spring.  Can anyone recommend an English-speaking driver who could take me 45 miles to find the oldest cache in Hungary (GCD68)?

[+terratin]

I had a few ideas for early 2025, but all kind of fell through. Thought of Iraqi Kurdistan, but could only get half affordable flights during Ramadan (I need to eat regularly during daytime). Group tours through Turkmenistan or Algeria were fully booked. Missed getting a cheap flight to Malaysia. Meh. But I found something now (not saying what yet). But it looks like next year I'll have new countries on the North American continent, Africa and Europe.

[+theolivee]

On 12/2/2024 at 9:17 AM, kusunflower said:

I am going to be in Budapest, Hungary in the spring.  Can anyone recommend an English-speaking driver who could take me 45 miles to find the oldest cache in Hungary (GCD68)?

Hey! I have a "sister" in Debrecen, Hungary (foreign exchange student), and she told me many times that there is a large number of people there that speak English well. I think in a bigger city you won't have many troubles finding someone. I'd reach out to her and her family but Debrecen is very far from Budapest. Sorry if you needed a more specific answer! 

Edited December 10, 2024 by theolivee

[+terratin]

19 hours ago, theolivee said:

Hey! I have a "sister" in Debrecen, Hungary (foreign exchange student), and she told me many times that there is a large number of people there that speak English well. I think in a bigger city you won't have many troubles finding someone. I'd reach out to her and her family but Debrecen is very far from Budapest. Sorry if you needed a more specific answer! 

I found public transport from Budapest to be very easy provided one has a working phone contract. One could do this trip with a combination of tram and bus (less than 1h) and then a little walk.

[+terratin]

So I think all my main trips for next year are sorted 😬 Crazy that my main trips are already booked so early on: Marrakesh, Monaco from Nice, Greenland and Mauritania. 😍

[+Goldenwattle]

9 hours ago, terratin said:

So I think all my main trips for next year are sorted 😬 Crazy that my main trips are already booked so early on: Marrakesh, Monaco from Nice, Greenland and Mauritania. 😍

So far for 2025, I have booked a tour for Vietnam and Cambodia. Will be looking at Japan and South Korea too for later. Plus maybe some other places. I have considered cruises that go to Greenland. The same as for the Antarctica, which I logged this year. I figure for some places cruises are the easiest way to get there.

 Must be getting old; cruises and tours. When I was young I would backpack from country to country, a couple of times taking my bike with me as transport. Never cruises or tours.

[+terratin]

5 hours ago, Goldenwattle said:

So far for 2025, I have booked a tour for Vietnam and Cambodia. Will be looking at Japan and South Korea too for later. Plus maybe some other places. I have considered cruises that go to Greenland. The same as for the Antarctica, which I logged this year. I figure for some places cruises are the easiest way to get there.

 Must be getting old; cruises and tours. When I was young I would backpack from country to country, a couple of times taking my bike with me as transport. Never cruises or tours.

 

Good choices, but still long flights from Australia, no? For me, Europe is getting difficult now, but there are still lots of places with reasonable travel time and little time zone variation.

[+Goldenwattle]

35 minutes ago, terratin said:

still long flights from Australia

Nine hours is short(ish) for us 😅.

[+Vooruit!]

Algeria is on my list for 2025 too. Crazy: I'll only be the eighth cacher from my country (the Netherlands) to (well, hopefully) find a cache in that country.

[+Vooruit!]

Just booked a trip to Tbilisi (Georgia) and managed to find a rental car company that doesn't overcharge crossing the border to Armenia. Azerbaijan has had its borders closed for a couple of years now, but there's a multi close to the border with the final location in Georgia. So yeah, Caucasus baby!

[+funkymunkyzone]

Just got back from Taiwan, for country number 87.  Just a quick trip - 4 days - during which we got up into the mountains and visited the famous Taroko Gorge.  Lots of evidence of the massive earthquake from April last year with roading repairs still happening.

 

Taiwan is a very clean country, we hardly ever saw any rubbish around the place.  It's also a surprisingly cheap destination, with high quality hotels (certainly in this time of the year) for around 100USD, reasonably priced rental cars, cheap petrol.  Stunning coutnryside in the mountains (we got out of the city as quickly as we could and didn't head back until we needed to fly out).  Really crazy steep mountains and mountain roads that you wouldn't believe (think Bolivian death roads but tarmac and with a barrier - no joke).

 

A lot of the caches there have spoiler images, which is helpful if you get into a situation where you are trying to find a cache without acting too suspiciously.

 

We even snagged 6 FTFs during our trip, and they took us to some rteally cool places we wouldn't have otherwise visited.

 

Highly recommended destination!

[+Goldenwattle]

1 hour ago, funkymunkyzone said:

Taiwan

A short trip, but sounds that you filled it well, with countryside worth seeing.

I have one unexpected cache find there, due to a typhoon and because of that we couldn't land in Hong Kong. They tried though, but after three aborted attempts and me gripping the seat rests expecting a very rough landing, we were diverted to Taipei, where the weather was good and a gentle touch down. The hotel the airline put me in had a cache a very short distance away (basically outside), and I ticked off Taiwan. The plane passengers weren't meant to leave the hotel (I interpreted that cache a short distance away was in the hotel grounds), as we weren't officially in Taiwan.

I didn't get to see what you did. Only a dark night bus ride to the hotel, the hotel, the great view from the hotel balcony and the cache at the bottom of the hotel's large front outside grand staircase. No interesting winding road, which no doubt gave your wonderful views, even if scary. Did you look ?

Edited January 14 by Goldenwattle

[+funkymunkyzone]

14 hours ago, Goldenwattle said:

A short trip, but sounds that you filled it well, with countryside worth seeing.

I have one unexpected cache find there, due to a typhoon and because of that we couldn't land in Hong Kong. They tried though, but after three aborted attempts and me gripping the seat rests expecting a very rough landing, we were diverted to Taipei, where the weather was good and a gentle touch down. The hotel the airline put me in had a cache a very short distance away (basically outside), and I ticked off Taiwan. The plane passengers weren't meant to leave the hotel (I interpreted that cache a short distance away was in the hotel grounds), as we weren't officially in Taiwan.

I didn't get to see what you did. Only a dark night bus ride to the hotel, the hotel, the great view from the hotel balcony and the cache at the bottom of the hotel's large front outside grand staircase. No interesting winding road, which no doubt gave your wonderful views, even if scary. Did you look ?

 

Sounds like you were taken to the Taipei Grand Hotel, which is where we also stayed the first night.  A grand building indeed, and also very resonably priced.

 

The roads, I mean, there are no words.  I'm not good with heights, but driving I am totally fine, but yeah my stomach was in my mouth a few times.  Particularly when you could see a bluff ahead, and the cliff drops away into eternity on one side.  Felt like if you went over the edge, you'd have plenty of time to consider your life choices!

 

But yeah, amazing landscape!

[+Goldenwattle]

8 hours ago, funkymunkyzone said:

Taipei Grand Hotel

That is the one .

[+terratin]

I think I'm still missing 8 countries in Europe. For this year I'd planned to put two on my geomap. And then Ryanair offered cheap flights. And I resisted. And then they reduced prices for specific days even more and hotels/hostels for that period turned out to be chap, and now it looks like I'll be adding San Marino to my geomap as well this year. Now I'm pretty much out of vacation days for this year. Though the office is closed between 22.12-04.01. Thus still some options 😅

[+Viajero Perdido]

A few days ago I added Spain as (I think) my 23rd country, and at the same moment, added the continent of Africa for a challenge I'm working on.

 

I think there's a few places you can pull that off.  I'm at the one with lots of of tourists, lots of hikers, and 3/4 of the cache logs are in German.

 

[+ecanderson]

9 minutes ago, Viajero Perdido said:

A few days ago I added Spain as (I think) my 23rd country, and at the same moment, added the continent of Africa for a challenge I'm working on.

 

I think there's a few places you can pull that off.  I'm at the one with lots of of tourists, lots of hikers, and 3/4 of the cache logs are in German.

 

 

Interesting idea.  You sure it played out the way you expected???

 

I have cached on Tenerife (really like that island!) and that's part of my collection of Spanish caches, but did not receive any 'Africa' credit for caching there.  The first one I snagged was GC10X34 back in 2009. 

 

[+Viajero Perdido]

Oh, I don't care what Groundspeak thinks about geography.  This is for a travel-bingo challenge (pre-checker era), I already have my smiley for a row of five, and now I'm just going for the unofficial blackout.  I think I'm in the lead.  So I just need to convince the peanut gallery that the Canaries are indeed Africa.  As someone pointed out, they're on the African continental shelf.  That'll be my story too.

 

PS, the owner of that challenge walked into a geo-pub event in Thailand, surprising the heck out of me, who was already seated and a couple of beers in.  We're old caching buddies, and I had no idea she was even on the same continent.  Of all the geo-joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into this one.

 

Edited January 19 by Viajero Perdido

[+terratin]

9 minutes ago, ecanderson said:

 

Interesting idea.  You sure it played out the way you expected???

 

I have cached on Tenerife (really like that island!) and that's part of my collection of Spanish caches, but did not receive any 'Africa' credit for caching there.  The first one I snagged was GC10X34 back in 2009. 

 

Wondering as well about the specific rules. Politically it's part of Europe. Geographically close to Africa. Geologically offshore and not connected to a continental plate.

[+ecanderson]

On 1/19/2025 at 10:15 AM, terratin said:

Wondering as well about the specific rules. Politically it's part of Europe. Geographically close to Africa. Geologically offshore and not connected to a continental plate.

Looks like @Viajero Perdido clarified - the Africa claim wasn't a gc.com related thing. 

I've always been credited for the 'political location', not the physical one, when finding/logging caches.  E.g., Azores go to Portugal, Canaries to Spain.

 

[+funkymunkyzone]

Yeah, I think go with whatever definition suits you as there will always be someone that disagrees, because the definitions aren't exactly crystal clear.

 

I own the furthest SW physical geocache in Europe.  It's at the very SW tip of mainland Portugal.  I don't define the Azores as being part of the continent of Europe - while they definitely are part of Europe politically, they are islands on the mid Atlantic ridge and don't belong to any continent, and the Canaries, well, Id' say not Europe either (and probably not Africa either).

[+ecanderson]

3 hours ago, funkymunkyzone said:

Yeah, I think go with whatever definition suits you as there will always be someone that disagrees, because the definitions aren't exactly crystal clear.

 

I own the furthest SW physical geocache in Europe.  It's at the very SW tip of mainland Portugal.  I don't define the Azores as being part of the continent of Europe - while they definitely are part of Europe politically, they are islands on the mid Atlantic ridge and don't belong to any continent, and the Canaries, well, Id' say not Europe either (and probably not Africa either).

Even that's an interesting definition.  While a 'vacation' cache in the SW tip of Portugal might be the westernmost cache in Europe (it's not - that's in Ireland), there are certainly also caches further south in Europe as well in Spain and Gibraltar.

 

I would note that there are also now other caches in the vicinity of GC12CRJ that are both further south and further west in the vicinity of the São Vicente landmark.  You've got one cool spot there, though!

 

Life is pretty fluid out there - but you can't beat the geography.

 

Edited January 21 by ecanderson

[+funkymunkyzone]

25 minutes ago, ecanderson said:

Even that's an interesting definition.  While a 'vacation' cache in the SW tip of Portugal might be the westernmost cache in Europe (it's not - that's in Ireland), there are certainly also caches further south in Europe as well in Spain and Gibraltar.

 

I would note that there are also now other caches in the vicinity of GC12CRJ that are both further south and further west in the vicinity of the São Vicente landmark.  You've got one cool spot there, though!

 

Life is pretty fluid out there - but you can't beat the geography.

 

 

No, I said furthest SW, not the furthest west nor south.

 

And it wasn't a vacation cache at the time.

 

The others there aren't physical caches, and they came later.

Edited January 21 by funkymunkyzone

[+hzoi]

On 1/20/2025 at 9:10 PM, funkymunkyzone said:

I own the furthest SW physical geocache in Europe.  It's at the very SW tip of mainland Portugal.

 

I knew you meant Point Sagres before I looked it up. I didn't realize that was your hide. We found that one 17 years ago this week!

[+terratin]

23 minutes ago, hzoi said:

 

I knew you meant Point Sagres before I looked it up. I didn't realize that was your hide. We found that one 17 years ago this week!

 

Wow, so old? Mind sharing the gc code?

Started thinking about what to do with those 'forced' 16 days off between Christmas and into the new year (office closed). Maybe visit my country of shame properly: Sweden. I only found a cache there while traveling through from Denmark to Denmark, which doesn't really count for me. But Sweden is on my geomap due to this. Could visit the really old Swedish cache from Stockholm maybe.

[+hzoi]

On 1/23/2025 at 10:11 AM, terratin said:

Wow, so old? Mind sharing the gc code?

 

GC12CRJ

[+funkymunkyzone]

On 1/28/2025 at 10:58 AM, hzoi said:

 

GC12CRJ

 

Please don't give me too much heat on my CO-ship of this cache.  I'm aware it needs maintenance.  I was living there at the time it was hidden, and had a partner, now long time ex, whose family lived there and could perform maintenance if neccesary.  It's a bit trickier now that I am almost on the directly opposite side of the world... Kind of makes the cache name mildly ironic for me.

[+terratin]

Country 71 is a fact: Morocco. Great landscapes, lovely people, good food. Meh caches, but I found a few at least. I'll certainly have to return and rent a car to spend a lot more time there.

[+Smitherington]

I was able to add the Dominican Republic and Bahamas to my list on a recent cruise but weather kept us out of Turks & Caicos.  Oh well.  Must try again sometime. 

[+Goldenwattle]

I have now added Vietnam (13 finds) and Cambodia (10 finds). Cambodia just today.

Edited February 25 by Goldenwattle

[+Vooruit!]

Added Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan with Tbilisi as my 'home base', which was absolutely horrible traffic-wise. But hey, some more color on the map, so who cares?

 

Planned: Cyprus (July). Wishlist: Iraq, Saudi, Algeria, Syria.