Beneath the 'Lost World' Traditional Cache
Shamcock: This one I know has been nicked by the locals ...so best archived. But it's still worth a visit ..an amazing place, however the little 'hotel' is now sadly very run down...
-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(small)
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
Near the small 'Timor Village Hotel at Wailakorini near Loihunu in central Timor.
Drive there from Dili or Bacau, stay the night, swim in the river pools and look up at Timor's Mundo Perdidu, its 'Lost World.
The cache is well hidden but close to the hotel.
‘Beneath the Lost World’
From Dili the 190 km to Ossu, actually to the village of Loihunu just beyond, is a fine drive.
After the town of Venilale, which is 20 k inland from the north coast town of Bacau, the world changes....off to the east you can see the high and daunting shoulders of Matebian, Timor’s second highest peak, dominating the landscape.... and ahead the apparently impenetrable fortress of Mundo Perdidu, Timor’s very own ‘Lost World’ which you must cross before you descend towards the south coast.
It was in these craggy limestone mountains that the Fretelin guerrillas withstood all the Indonesian military could hurl at them for two decades or more. A place of long memories and no doubt a place of many ghosts, which, viewed through another eye, is not dissimilar to the high Dolomites of the Italian Alps on a fine day but with one thing missing, the odd ski lift here or there......there are in their place, at each coll that Hilda took us over, the red and white Telecom towers put in by the Indonesians in their efforts to colonise and subdue this savage land.....towers now maintained and guarded by the UN.......
Cross the great divide and the descent down from this limestone spine into the south of the island is much rougher than to the north and located in a deep valley between two limestone cliffs there is a small ‘Timor Village Wailakorini’ hotel....located at :
S 08°46’42.1”
E 126°22’47.1”
Elevation 902'
It is clean, the food voluminous, the beer cold but the water is a tragedy...we booked the posh room with the en-suite facilities...pity the loo didn’t flush and only a drip escaped from the shower....which is strange as Loihunu, the local village, which the hotel is just beside, is an exporter of endless quantities of fresh water and fresh water fish from the huge fish ponds which dominate the place.
So what to do about a wash??...Jump in the river, there’s enough fresh water gurgling out of and over the limestone boulders and crags, even now during this parched dry season.
A deep, green rock pool big enough for a couple of football teams beckons. Little fish nibble your feet and there is calm about the place broken only by the bubbling of the water as it cascades into the pool. So who needs en-suite accommodation anyway?
It’s perfect place to relax and look around for a hiding place for our next Timorese Geocache. This time we are prepared with the little plastic sandwich box, notebook and pencil. Ready to be hidden.
Aha!
Beneath the tangled roots of a scraggy tree, clinging precariously to a big boulder there is a place.
High enough up to survive the wet season flood, visible from both the swimming hole, the hotel and from the base of a very tall, straight and very dead eucalypt standing above the rock pool at
S 08°46’38.6”
E 126°22’44.1”
Elevation 862’
Our cache isn’t beneath the roots of the tree in the picture but beneath the roots of another one, easier to get too without breaking your neck and the location is visible 15 paces NNE of the dead tree!!!
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Bhe pnpur vf irel jryy uvqqra oruvaq n fznyy yhzc bs yvzrfgbar oruvaq gur ebbgf naq haqre gur gehax bs n yrnsl gerr ba n ovt ebpx.
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
Loading Treasures