Geocaching Australia

So you are planning a trip to Australia and hope to find a few caches while you are here but you're not sure how to find Caches nearby to where you will be staying?

Australian Postcodes (You might know them as ZIP codes) are 4 digits.
www.austpost.com.au/postcodes has a handy utility to look up the postcode for a Suburb or Town which you can then use to do a search.

The middle of the Capital Cities are:
Darwin 0800
Sydney 2000
Canberra 2600
Melbourne 3000
Brisbane 4000
Adelaide 5000
Perth 6000
Hobart 7000

Some of the maps for Australia provided on www.geocaching.com are quite poor.
www.geocaching.com.au has some alternative maps as well as some extra caches which are not listed on www.geocaching.com
If you are a Google Earth user there is also a live network feed available.

Good Luck and Happy Caching.

Forum discussion on "Deadly Creatures": http://forum.geocaching.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=2339



Anyone else have something they wish to add please do.

I will be visiting Melbourne in May for a weekend and hope to do at least some caching before and after the meeting. Is there a source of free or inexpensive maps for my Garmin MAP60?

Magellan user here. Maybe have a look in the software/hardware section.

KiwiChris wrote:I will be visiting Melbourne in May for a weekend and hope to do at least some caching before and after the meeting. Is there a source of free or inexpensive maps for my Garmin MAP60?

http://www.osmaustralia.org/garmin.php

Free in every sense of the word.

Do these maps exist for any other countries?

Absolutley,

I have a wiki entry on it here:
http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/OpenStreetMap

this site: http://garmin.na1400.info/routable.php lets you build Garmin maps wherever you want in the world.

OSM is a user contributed mapping system, and as such maps may not be 100%, but they are free and don't require you to break the law to obtain them.

(I've spent more time in the last 6 months contributing to OSM than any other projects, I'm quite passionate about it)

There are tools to create maps for other things like OziExplorer etc too.

Fantastic. I always wondered what happens if you take a mapping GPS over seas and don't have maps for it. What appears on the screen?? I have cached OS but then I only had a non mapping etrex so it didn't matter.

you may also require some assistance understanding the local lingo, even if you already speak english.

this link is helpful:
http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html