Motocaching - anyone interested?

[MagicSquirrel]

3 years of living without a bike is coming to an end and I'm picking up my brand new Scrambler from AKL next weekend.
While roaming around the discussion boards around the world I found http://motocaching.net
It seems to be picking up speed around Scandinavia, UK and northern Europe and has few rides in US too.
Based on a quick look it seems to be a bit like photo tag runs. People tag places or rides worth seeing/riding and other bikers can go to check them out at their own pace and rate the tag location.

Looks like a good idea to me. I've been crawling through this site in order to find nice gravel roads to ride and seeing them in map with a short description would be great. Few years back we did bit of geocaching and it was great way of ending up in very scenic places that are known only by locals, maybe motocaching.net type service will help us to share the knowledge of worthy rides more easily?

[Night Falcon]

Josh at Remotemoto has some pretty cool tracks with pics all ready to go ride. South Island available only at this stage but he is working on NI routes as I understand it.....here's the link to his site http://www.remotemoto.com/

[Eddieb]

For roads in the Waikato check out: http://www.adventureridingnz.co.nz/g...island-tracks/

[MagicSquirrel]

Thanks, I think those will keep me busy when the nearby gravel roads get too familiar

[pomgolian]

3 years of living without a bike is coming to an end and I'm picking up my brand new Scrambler from AKL next weekend.
While roaming around the discussion boards around the world I found http://motocaching.net
It seems to be picking up speed around Scandinavia, UK and northern Europe and has few rides in US too.
Based on a quick look it seems to be a bit like photo tag runs. People tag places or rides worth seeing/riding and other bikers can go to check them out at their own pace and rate the tag location.

Looks like a good idea to me. I've been crawling through this site in order to find nice gravel roads to ride and seeing them in map with a short description would be great. Few years back we did bit of geocaching and it was great way of ending up in very scenic places that are known only by locals, maybe motocaching.net type service will help us to share the knowledge of worthy rides more easily?

I like the concept as most of my rides are to see specific places which then turn into routes there and back, the other two sites are great but different

[tri boy]

Nice bike choice squire.
I'm just up the road at Te Pahu, so i sense a scrambler park up at the Pirongia pub, or cafe may be in the future.

[pleksi]

You have some great motorcycle websites in New Zealand and it's nice to see that you like the concept of motocaching too (I'm the guy who is developing it).

New Zealand is about the same size as Southern Finland (most of the population lives there) and the number of people is about the same too. Therefore I think that it would be possible to get motocaching going in New Zealand in pretty much the same way as it started in Finland.

We started in the middle of last summer when there was only a couple of months left of the season. However, at the end of the season we had already about 300 locations and routes listed (we call them caches like in geocaching but there is actually nothing hidden).

One important part of the concept is that people write something about the places that they have found (like logging in Geocaching). Of course some people just use the site as a source of information but there are a lot of active riders who take it as a hobby or a game. These active motocachers write "Found it!" logs and comments and thus provide up-to-date information about the routes, coffee shops etc. At the end of the summer there was about 1500 found it logs. The "game of finding" also seems to motivate people to add new caches.

These active people also organize meetings (event caches like in Geocaching) and talk about motocaching related things on a Finnish motorcycle forum. The result of this is that lot of group rides have been made to various cache locations. By the way the motocaching topic is the most active topic on the forum. Because of that new members register every day.

At the moment there are 460 caches in Finland and 3290 'Found it!" logs (all done in about 2+2 months - winter in between). Motocaching is now the website that has the biggest number of motorcycle routes in Finland (+coffee shops and other points of interest). Other sites don't come even close.

Perhaps the most siginificant difference between motocaching.net and other motorcycle sites is that the idea of motocaching is to list all sorts of places that other riders may find interesting. The purpose is just to give some destination for a ride - or rather a lot of rides. Personally I have been surprised how many nice (or strange, or amazing, or spooky...) places there are in one hour range from my home that I knew nothing about.

Yesterday a 50 year old guy who has now visited 258 motocaches, wrote that he really likes to ride to new places and now that he has been motocachig, he has learned more about Finland than ever before.

All you need now, is a few people who make the first caches (maybe 20-30?) and keep up the discussion on the forum so that others find it too. I hope that motocaching takes off in New Zealand. It's a lot of fun once you get it going.

[haydes55]

That's awesome to have the actual developer find this thread and comment.

Sounds similar to the tag-o-rama games. Good fun.

[pleksi]

The first local motocache in New Zealand : https://www.motocaching.net/en/cache/view/id6209

I think that this is a perfect example of a motocache

I hope that you get more of these and it's soon like here in Finland where I can choose a new interesting destination for every ride.

[Toymotor]

I think this is a cool idea. Ive recently got into Geocaching (actually thought this thread was to do with this before clicking) to get out with the dog partner and niece & nephews. Then it quickly became something I could do on the bike, explore some places i haven't gone, or stop at places i never would have. Would have a crack at this for sure.

[RMOTO]

I think this is a cool idea. Ive recently got into Geocaching (actually thought this thread was to do with this before clicking) to get out with the dog partner and niece & nephews. Then it quickly became something I could do on the bike, explore some places i haven't gone, or stop at places i never would have. Would have a crack at this for sure.

Hi Toymotor, a lot has happened since this thread was started. If you find the concept of motocaching interesting perhaps you may prefer the more social NZ version on RemoteMoto called Mototokens. Its only just been released by is growing by the week.

All the info can be found here: Mototokens

Cheers

Josh

[Toymotor]

Will have a look cheers.

[pleksi]

indeed a lot has happened... www.motocaching.net has now 761 routes and points of interests (note that motocaching has both - not just routes or only spots). There are also currently 5467 visit logs and comments.

However, there's still only that one spot in New Zealand because it's the local bikers who are best in adding the routes and spots. So, unfortunately I can't get motocaching started for you. I wish I could...

What the numbers are telling...
- it grows really quickly when some local riders start adding motocaches and talk about it on some local forum (when the community starts sharing, the results are amazing).
- the community review system makes it possible to get high quality descriptions published at a fast pace
- the concept is great and people don't just read about great roads and spots but they also ride there
- it's very social and has a lot of up to date information (there are event caches too)

I has been nice to see that motocaching has started spreading to neighboring countries. So far mainly because Finnish motorcyclists ride in those countries too. I have now visited more than 200 motocaches in Finland and we are planning a motocaching trip to Estonia next spring.

Here's a list of the countries that have motocaches.

[Night Falcon]

indeed a lot has happened... www.motocaching.net has now 761 routes and points of interests (note that motocaching has both - not just routes or only spots). There are also currently 5467 visit logs and comments.

However, there's still only that one spot in New Zealand because it's the local bikers who are best in adding the routes and spots. So, unfortunately I can't get motocaching started for you. I wish I could...

What the numbers are telling...
- it grows really quickly when some local riders start adding motocaches and talk about it on some local forum (when the community starts sharing, the results are amazing).
- the community review system makes it possible to get high quality descriptions published at a fast pace
- the concept is great and people don't just read about great roads and spots but they also ride there
- it's very social and has a lot of up to date information (there are event caches too)

I has been nice to see that motocaching has started spreading to neighboring countries. So far mainly because Finnish motorcyclists ride in those countries too. I have now visited more than 200 motocaches in Finland and we are planning a motocaching trip to Estonia next spring.

Here's a list of the countries that have motocaches.

It might take off a bit now the weather is starting to get better down under plus this site has been pretty dormant of late, maybe things will pick up in the summer.

[Tazz]

Yeah I plan to do a few over summer. And some remotemoto stuff. Tis hard though as I don't really like stopping if I don't have to (which taking some decent pics requires).