Earlier this year, I made a start on The Seint's 2023 challenge, getting to Step 5 before work intervened. It's hard to believe it's the middle of July before I've had chance to pick it up again! An explanation of the challenge and how to test your solution for each step is explained in Part 1, so let's press on.
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SPOILER ALERT!
If you want to have a go at solving The SEINT's puzzle yourself, please DON'T read on here, as this is obviously heavily spoilered.
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Here's the clue for Step 5:
step5.txt — Now it's time to move on. Let's change the continent and meet some friends. They started their road trip from San Diego, through Barcelona, heading to Valencia. We are heading from Valencia, on the same route, but in the opposite direction. We ride our cars with roughly the same speed, so we shall meet in the middle, after driving 154 miles.
Can you look into the map and tell the name of the town we will be meeting in?
The name of the town, written in lowercase and turned into a hash, is the pass to the next step.
Look out for the traps on the road described above! :)
Given that we are in a puzzle, we can probably rule out Spain, which is the obvious place to look. And "let's change the continent" means we don't need to look in North America. Are there any other possibilities?
According to Wikipedia, there are several countries with places named San Diego: Argentina, Colombia, Spain, United States, Venezuela. The only crossover with Barcelona, outside Spain and the US, is Venezuela. So let's have a look there...
There are at least two places named San Diego in Venezuela, but only one of them makes the journey linear, and approximately the right length:
Google Maps tell us this journey will be 496km/308mi! And picking through the details of the journey, we see that halfway along is the town of Marizapa, our answer. Remember to convert this to lower case, and generate an MD5 hash in CyberChef.
Step 6
It turns out I was further along in the puzzle than I thought, as the next clue looks to be the final one. This time we get a picture along with the clue:
step6.txt — This is the last part of our journey around the world! It's winter time and everybody's looking for Santa. Are these guys also wishing to see his sleigh in the sky? What can they be looking at?
The name of this thing they are looking at, written in lowercase and without spaces, turned into a hash, is the key!
Yandex Image Search wasn't much help with the overall picture. Bing Images wanted me to look at Japanese biker gangs (!), and Google Lens wasn't much help either. Zooming in on the street sign in Yandex confirmed the image is from Japan, however. Time to zoom in a bit more...
The licence plate on the yellow car matches the format used in Japan:
The only writing I can see in the image is on the building with the multi-coloured panels, where I can make out the word "VIGOR" on a sign, and the partial words "SUM_" and "Bar_" on the window. The second storey window looks to be full of bottles. If I had a bit of local knowledge, I might have known that SUM_ was likely Sumida, a distinct area within Tokyo. Unfortunately I didn't know that, so I spent a long time on search engines looking for vigor+bar, vigor+sum+bar+tokyo etc., without really getting anywhere. Eventually, I zoomed in on the very faint Kanji on the sign to the right of the second storey window:
I knew that Google Lens can read text from images, but really doubted that it would manage on something with such poor resolution (in the original image, this is TINY!). I thought about tracing over the letters to try and make it 'easier' for Google, but in reality I was likely to make it more unreadable. In the end, I thought I'd try it in Google Lens anyway, and a minor miracle happened:
Not only could it read the text, but it had the location already cued up for me in Google Maps! And here it is without a lamppost in the way:
The neighbouring building has been renovated beyond all recognition, but Sumida Vigor is unmistakeable. Being in Street View made it really easy to spin around and see what the motorcyclists were looking at, but it really pops in the 3D view:
This is the Tokyo Skytree, which is now the 94th reason I really want to go to Japan! Off to CyberChef to create the hash, which I confirmed by using it to open step7.zip, to find the finisher's badge:
Thanks again to The Seint for a great little challenge! You should probably bookmark their GitHub repo if you want to take part in the next one...
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Feature image by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash