pin-box

The pin-box geocache (GC157) was placed on 12 January 2001 by Max Lee, on the edge of the campus of Seoul National University, in South Korea. The game was eight months old and had not yet reached Asia: of the roughly three hundred and forty boxes placed around the world before February 2001 and still listed the following autumn, only one was Asian.

The listing amounts to a few lines of approximate English: "It looks like a film box", "There is a password", "God bless you". The password was waiting at the end of a web page on a "Daum café" (a Korean web forum) devoted to the outdoors.

Nobody ever found anything, and the failure logs are worth the detour. In January 2002, canonnie walked 3.5 km from the metro, got to within fifty metres of the goal, gave up the climb because it was so cold, and left swearing that the view of the snow-covered mountains had been worth the trip. In June, an American in Seoul on business, helped by a stranger he had approached in a metro station, spent two whole days inspecting every tree within a fifteen-metre radius: nothing. The owner confirmed to him that the box, a 35 mm film canister fixed to a trunk, had probably vanished. Two other visitors failed the same year, one of them carrying a travel bug brought back from the United States.

The geocache was archived in 2004 without ever having received a single find. The oldest Korean geocache still in play, NamHanSanSeong, was only placed in 2003; the local community has looked after it ever since as a piece of national history.