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geocaching overseas


gerry&rosalie

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We will be travelling in Europe in the Fall and thought it would be fun to do a bit of geocaching while hiking around.

I am assuming that all tips and site information will be in the native language of the country we are visiting.

 

Has anyone had an experience with this and offer any suggestions?

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I am assuming that all tips and site information will be in the native language of the country we are visiting.

 

Being european and after some caching in a handful of countries I would say that the listings are mostly in the local language, but the hints are also in English in a good rate... besides, most of the earthcaches have their listing in english.

My advice would be to plan carefully your trips at home, creating Pocket Queries and Caches in a Route. After that, you can look at the results and check if there are pertinent text or hints that you need translate with your good old Google Translate. You can add the translation with Personal Notes to each cache.

 

Have a nice trip and try not to miss the most beautiful corner of Europe... the westernmost. ;)

Edited by RuideAlmeida
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I am assuming that all tips and site information will be in the native language of the country we are visiting.

 

Being european and after some caching in a handful of countries I would say that the listings are mostly in the local language, but the hints are also in English in a good rate... besides, all the earthcaches have their listing in english by guidelines.

My advice would be to plan carefully your trips at home, creating Pocket Queries and Caches in a Route. After that, you can look at the results and check if there are pertinent text or hints that you need translate with your good old Google Translate. You can add the translation with Personal Notes to each cache.

 

Have a nice trip and try not to miss the most beautiful corner of Europe... the westernmost. ;)

 

Sorry, the listing of EarthCaches needs to be in the local language and other languages are optional. You might not get an English text unfortunately, though many people, especially in areas with lots of tourists do provide English listings.

 

If cache descrition is not in English then it might be a bit annoying to find out what the cache is about. But of course it can still be found. Might be a good idea to search for easier caches abroad. Also maybe a good idea to look at some hints. Some common hints will repeat and be easily identifyable.

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We will be travelling in Europe in the Fall and thought it would be fun to do a bit of geocaching while hiking around.

I am assuming that all tips and site information will be in the native language of the country we are visiting.

 

Has anyone had an experience with this and offer any suggestions?

 

Get a local SIM card when you arrive at the airport. Translate on the fly as needed.

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We will be travelling in Europe in the Fall and thought it would be fun to do a bit of geocaching while hiking around.

I am assuming that all tips and site information will be in the native language of the country we are visiting.

 

Has anyone had an experience with this and offer any suggestions?

 

Get a local SIM card when you arrive at the airport. Translate on the fly as needed.

 

Keep in mind that we don't know where the TO is traveling to. Mobile phone signal can be extremely rubbish in many parts of Europe, especially outside of towns. Huge parts of the UK are rather rubbish, and big parts of rural Germany don't even have 3G as I discovered recently. I tried to do an EarthCache in the city centre of Hannover, not a small town, and had no signal on any network I tried, had to walk out of that area, download the cache and then do it.

Edited by terratin
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The key is to be prepared. Unless you travel solely for caching you probably will just pick up a cache here and there and not go on longer runs. If you prepare it's easy to get translations (online or via CO).

If you happen to like Earthcaches, translate relevant info in advance (or even try to find answers online) and check what you found when you get there.

On a 4 week trip we have maybe 15 "must do" caches, then I also prepare (solve) mysteries we might come close to and look up all earthcaches we'll visit.

For traditionals you only need coordinates (hints are easy to translate in advance if you have a short list of key words), solved mysteries are in fact traditionals so it's also just hints you (might) need.

 

When we visit the North of Norway (we've seen the area already and just go to see Northern lights) I prepare translations in advance for whatever we want to do which is mostly non-traditionals. Many caches have Norwegian/English listings but we've managed multi's, Wherigo and letterboxes (and an event B) ) without any problems.

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Others have mentioned that in some places, there's more English in the descriptions then you might expect.

 

But do you always read the description? I don't, so it's not really too bad to search without the description or hint, anyway.

 

But in my experience, the language is not the main problem. Local standards are usually the bigger stumbling block, particularly if you're in tourist areas. For example, I failed miserably in one city we visited, and it was only when I got home I discovered it's because the caches had pictures attached showing exactly where the cache was, so they didn't bother with hints and such. My GPSr doesn't show pictures, so I was at a complete loss in the field.

 

So my main advice is to try to check out the descriptions in advance. In addition to giving you a good idea how much English you're going to find, this also allows you to translate at home when you need to so you can see how important the description, hint, and logs -- don't forget logs -- will be to you finding the cache, and might give you some other ideas about geocaching standards in that area. I actually find this useful in areas where English is the primary language, since it can give me some insights into the prevailing hide styles and other norms of the area.

 

And my second most important advice is not to sweat it too much once you get there. Yeah, you might not be able to find the caches as easily as in your home area, but still make sure to only have fun. Better to accept failure as the nature of the beast then to get frustrated and forget you're there to visit a wonderful new area, not to find every single geocache.

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We cached in France and Spain and most of the caches we looked at were in those languages. I'd translate them and paste into a note on my phone before we went out so I had it handy if we did some caching while we were out. We did do a few which I hadn't translated and we managed to pick up at least the hint with just a rudimentary grasp of both languages. In Norway and Iceland, all the caches were in English or had English translations. More touristy areas tend to include English descriptions too.

 

I did find that data on my phone in some rural areas was non-existent, so don't rely on a phone.

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10 years ago, when I first started geocaching, I lived in Germany but my German wasn't so great. Google translate got me pretty far. After a while, I figured out that for traditional caches I didn't need as much, though once I went paperless, having a travel sized German dictionary on hand did help with hint translation when I needed it.

 

These days, with Google Translate having an optical recognition app, I think it'd be much easier. But that would require a phone or other device with either a wifi or cell data connection.

 

To the OP, do you cache with a phone or a GPSr? Both? (Neither?)

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Sorry, the listing of EarthCaches needs to be in the local language and other languages are optional. You might not get an English text unfortunately, though many people, especially in areas with lots of tourists do provide English listings.

 

 

It depends on how old an EC is. In the first years English was required and so all these caches have an English version and often no local language version (the language rule is not applied to old ECs). Then the GSA made the terrible mistake to change the rles and deviate from the standard rules for every other type of cache.

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Have a look at the map and at some descriptions and logs of the geocaches of the places you want to visit before you go there to get a feeling what you can expect (listings in English/also in English/no English). Some owners write 'For english or french version, please contact me' etc. if their listing is in local language only. A lot of traditional geocaches don't require anything else than the coordinates in order to find them. You seem to prefer traditional geocaches, so no need to prepare for multi-caches, Unknowns and other non-traditional geocaches in advance. Sometimes spoiler pictures are quite essential for finding the geocache.

 

Cell signal could easily be poor or almost non-existent when you need it for a cache in places where you really won't expect it. So I have an app that supports complete offline caching - offline maps and PQs or a database - at least as a backup. If I happen to have a local SIM-card/new European Union roaming regulations and data receiption or WLAN then I can refresh descriptions and look at pictures I might need.

 

And I have google translate on my phone with offline stored dictionaries. For some languages don't expect too much from automatic translation, for example for Czech, especially if you want to see whether there is something helpful written in logs. Or what's the meaning of hints if they are more than simple words (magnetic, tree, corner, left, up etc.) or common cross-cultural references.

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I did find that data on my phone in some rural areas was non-existent, so don't rely on a phone.

...or get a phone app that works offline. It's a misconception that you need signal to cache with a phone.

 

Good idea. You could also get a phone app that does language translations for those caches with descriptions. When it comes time for me to upgrade my phone I'm thinking of keeping my current phone (a Samsung Galaxy S5 Active) into a GPS/Travel phone. With the case I have, and it's waterproof/shockproof design, and decent GPS chip, it would probably work pretty well.

I think I've found caches in about a dozen European countries and so far have had few issues with other languages (unless you count the time I had to explain Geocaching to a couple of Roman polizia that didn't seem to speak English). As I see it, when I'm traveling to another country I'm going to take the opportunity to see the country, and finding a few caches is a bonus. That might mean selecting only a handful of caches to find which either have descriptions in English or translate descriptions to English before I leave home. Just like in the U.S., when I'm in another country, I don't feel the need to find every cache.

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I've cached in almost 20 countries. Most recently in Cuba.

 

I'd recommend:


  •  
  • using a smart phone and an app that allows you to dl the entire cache description as well as GSAK. Use GSAK to plan (narrow down) which caches you're planning to go to. You can go through the caches and get whatever translations you need, then load them to the smart phone app, to include translating hints...
  • Using google's translation app on the smart phone (you can download the entire Spanish dictionary for instance - pretty sure a bunch of others). This allows you to paste the non English Text on the fly.

 

I was able to cache, in airplane mode, all over Cuba, Argentina and Uruguay last year.

 

Obviously, your smart phone has to have a built in gps, which I believe most do. And you don't need the cell tower triangulazation so no cellular data plan needed / wasted.

 

My biggest problem was battery drain. So buy one of those portable batteries - and make sure that it'll be allowed on the plane (over a certain amperage is banned).

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How can I use the geocaching.com maps to identify caches near large cities in europe? Or is there an easier method to do so? Thanks

I'm confused by your question. You can search for caches in Europe the same way you can search for them in the US. Are you having issues with map searches or the search function when you try looking up European caches?

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