We cache owners often have an abundance of ideas. Too many, sometimes, that we have to pick and choose the best ones to see the light of day. Occasionally, this leads to analysis paralysis or the fear that it’ll not be good enough, and we end up not publishing caches for the longest time.
Then, there are times when you think an idea is absolutely the best thing invented since sliced bread… and the execution falls flat on its face. I suppose you could say that these ones are ill-conceived - not quite yet ready to come out of the oven and needed to be carried to term. Perhaps they needed more thought, a little extra sugar and spice, a defter hand to construct or maybe… it really was dead on arrival, so to speak. But, still, it was published, and its ugly head is there for all to see. So, you hang your head in shame, and maybe proceed to quietly archive it one day, when no one notices.
This is the story of one of mine – which is well and truly, a half-baked idea.
This cache was originally the final for “Let Them Eat Kueh!”, which was supposed to be a delectable puzzle about some local treats – but I somehow misunderstood how the website worked, which mangled the code, and left it intractable. I sat on this for a while… and on the suggestion of a fellow geocacher who hated to see this nice cache go to waste, here it is, in its “second life” as a Traditional Cache.
The location of the cache itself, is an interesting, if not slightly obscure one. It’s now marked on Google Maps as the “Goldhill Avenue cul-de-sac”. It’s a very serene patch of green and grassland in the middle of a colonial estate which, as the cliché goes, “really doesn’t feel like Singapore”. The “park”, if you can call it that, has no official name on maps as far as I can tell, but I suspect it really wasn’t meant to be a park in the usual sense.
My personal hypothesis about the place is that it came about during the construction of the Second Bukit Timah Diversion Canal, which links the section of the Bukit Timah Canal just after Singapore Chinese Girls’ School and the Kallang – Whampoa River system. The “park” sits on top of an underground portion of the canal and serves to conceal/host the maintenance entrances to the canal.
In any case, it’s a lovely place to visit and explore at any time of the day. I discovered the area by accident one night, many years back, when I was cycling around the estate, but there are a few people who do come by deliberately for walks and birdwatching. It’s a bit of a chore to get to by foot from Malcolm Road or Dunearn Road, though, but the walk is a pleasant one for most parts through the quiet estate streets.
Enjoy the location and the cache!