I recently went on a month vacation in South Africa for the World Cup. Whilst I was there, I saw many wondrous sites – and of course fit in some geocaching. One place that was incredible was the World Heritage site and one of the Seven Wonders of the World….Victoria Falls.
In planning our vacation, I created the geocache maps for each location we were to visit so we would be prepared with the local GPX files. This is what I saw in Zimbabwe and the Victoria Falls area.
Not many located in that 5 mile radius when in Cape Town there were over 100. We were determined to get at least one geocache in every place, and especially in each country we visited. Who knows… maybe one day we can aim for having a geocache from every country where available…I know a few geocachers that have started this mission.
So we woke up and walked to Mosi-oa-Tunya, meaning “The Smoke that Thunders,” and is the indigenous name of Victoria Falls. The walk there was filled with locals selling their wares such as wood carvings and braided necklaces. It was very sad to see the plight of this nation and how the local people seemed defeated in their economy. Having recently abandoned their local currency of Zimbabwe dollars, they were very happy to see Americans and their newly adopted $$$. They sell their old currency of 100 Trillion dollars to use for $5. It’s worth $0.60 but we pay the ‘tourist premium’.
We arrive at the entrance and pay the $30 US entrance fee. And off we enter with our yellow rain jackets we rented for an additional $3 each. There are 14 different view points to stop at and some are very dry and some are very wet. We visited all of them….so you can guess if we came out wet or dry!
The geocache we were after here was GC28A6Z and it was an Earthcache. This is a cache that people can visit to learn about a unique geoscience feature or aspect of our Earth. EarthCaches include a set of educational notes and the details about where to find the location (latitude and longitude). Visitors to EarthCaches can see how our planet has been shaped by geological processes, how we manage the resources and how scientists gather evidence to learn about the Earth.
For more information about EarthCaches, visit http://www.earthcache.org/.
So we arrived at the location and it asks us to do the following to log this geocache:
- What is the area of the sheet of falling water?
- Calculate the amount of hydro power in the Falls- the equation you need is Power= Height*Flow*Gravity, where Gravity= 9.8 m/s^2.
- What is your elevation at your current position?
- Attach a picture of yourself at this location- though in high season the spray might make this very impractical!
We sent off the details for the above (Google is always a help on these things) and you can see the photo below. I guess we got a little wet!!!
Oh my god! Thanks so much for posting this and letting me know. What an adventure. I’ve been dying to go to South Africa for so long. This is just another tempting morsel.