Breakfast & Geocaching Planning
While exploring the vast temples of Angkor Wat, we wanted to make sure to do a bit of geocaching in Cambodia. After exploring the main temple in the early morning darkness and watching the sunrise over the temple, we decided to have a seat to plan our day & take note of some geocaches nearby. We stopped for a bit of breakfast to allow the sun to rise higher and higher, and then we were off on our adventure! After exploring Angkor Wat complex, we head over to Bayon to see what the smiling faces were about.
What is Geocaching & Why Go Geocaching?
Elephant Angkor GC1Q55W
While exploring the temple of Bayon, I couldn’t stop thinking that must be a geocache close by. So when we finished at Bayon, I pulled out our Garmin GPS and saw that there was a geocache .2 miles away, near the Terrace of Elephants. This would be our first attempt at geocaching in Cambodia, and it sounded exciting. So off we went toward the Terrace of Elephants. The Terrace of Elephants was a viewing stand for public ceremonies and served as a base for the king’s grand audience hall.
This cache appeared to be in the open up on a hill behind the Terrace’s stone structure. We first took our time to admire the ancient engravings throughout the Terrace wall, and intricate patterns of the carefully placed stones. It was truly amazing to think how this was built so long ago! Afterwards, we made our way up the hill toward the GZ (Ground Zero for the cache location).
Read Also Geocaching in Angkor Wat (Butterfly Temple)
Geocaching Terrace of Elephants
We followed our Garmin Oregon 300 up a hill that looked out over the Terrace of Elephants. Being a popular destination, there were several “Muggles” wandering around, which caused us to take extra precautions, but I had the best lookout around. While Liz was keeping her eye out for Muggles, I went to the top of the hill to see if I could make a discovery of our own.
At the top of the hill there was an old stone wall, it wasn’t an official structure on the map, just one of the many small remnants around here. I was thinking that this would be a perfect place for a geocache. After quite a bit of digging through leaves and searching under stones, I stumbled upon something that I thought could be a geocache (or maybe just trash). It was a black bag in an opening of the wall. I examined it further and thought that if it could even possibly be an animal of some sort balled up; which really made me nervous because I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of animals lurked in these parts!
“What is that?”
So I was thinking of letting it go and logging a DNF (Did Not Find), but I couldn’t bring myself to do that this far from home. I decided to grab a stick to poke this bag and see what it was. To my amazement, when I pulled the bag out, the geocache dropped into my hand. “Yep this is it Liz!” I yelled to her.
We signed the log and replaced the cache without anyone spotting us. The excitement of finding this geocache in such a monumental place really got our geocaching juices flowing for the day! Now we knew that there were geocaches hidden in Angkor and that we could find them using our GPS. Not only was our day going to be filled with history and scenery as we explore these temples throughout the jungle, but we would be able go geocaching in Cambodia.
On to exploring and more Geocaching
