"My Experience at the Tottori Safari Zone"

#PokemonGO: Today I was able to attend the final of three days of the Tottori event and I thought I would share my experience with those who did not attend.I ended up going a really odd way because a lot of the direct routes from where I lived had been booked as early as the event was announced. I went all the way to Kobe via night bus (which is actually further from me than Tottori is) and then took a limited express train to Tottori, which was super packed with people and I had to stand in the aisles for two hours, however the train itself was filled with 70% pokemon trainers, so that was fun. I ended up meeting two guys from Malaysia and a guy from Switzerland and we ended up spending the day together.Upon arriving at Tottori station, I turned on my game and was immediately soft banned, which was a huge bummer. I have no idea where they get the idea of who is cheating and who isn't. I purposely didn't play on the train to avoid this happening as it happened once before while I was traveling. After spinning a pokestop at least 80 times (definitely more than the 40 times I read about), my ban was lifted. We ended up walking to the sand dunes (about 8 km), as I heard about people waiting 3 hours for the free bus on Friday. In fact it was so congested earlier that they ended up moving spawns across the whole city rather than just the dunes. We were able to find two variations of Unown along our slow paced 2 hour walk to the dunes as well as many Mr. Mime, Chansey, and Kangaskhan.When I arrived at the dunes, my portable wifi couldn't connect due to a poor signal which really bummed me out. There was free wifi at the event, but it was very poor and I only able to reach the registration page once and even then, I couldn't register and wasted a bit of time trying to this. Eventually, one of the guys set up a mobile hotspot from his phone for me and I was able to enjoy with everyone else.The sand dunes itself was both really fun, and yet disappointing at the same time. It was so open and while there weren't as many people as there were in pictures that I saw from Friday and Saturday, there were still plenty of people. The entire time were there there was a light rain, enough to be a little annoying, but still playable without an umbrella. Despite there being so many pokestops, it felt like it took a while to get between them. You could generally tell where something rare was as there'd be random clumps of many people together in certain areas, usually a Lapras or an Unown. In the desert, we were able to find the remaining unowns, although it seemed like forever to find the S. Actually, a nearby shop gave free soft served ice cream to anyone who could show they caught S, A, K, Y, and U unowns(although we didn't do this because we had just purchased nashi ice cream somewhere else). One of the non-pokemon things I wanted to do here was ride the camels (it is on my bucket list), but due to the rain, the camels were wrapped up and unable to provide rides.All in all, my catches for the day were about 5 Chansey, several Mr. Mime and Kangaskhan (both which I already had caught before), at least 1 of each of the five Unown (two of which were new, as three also appeared at the Yokohama event), and maybe three Lapras. The guys that I was traveling with really wanted to find shinies, but I didn't care as much as I already had 3 shiny pikachu and 2 shiny magikarp. Towards the end on the way back to the buses, I ended up finding a shiny Pikachu and then immediately after (the following pokemon) I ended up finding a shiny Magikarp. Not long after, the Switzerland guy found a magikarp on his brother's phone. The rates definitely seemed to be higher, but there were no ghost pokemon nearby and those are the shiny pokemon I really desired.We took the free bus back to the station (20 or so minutes waiting, which isn't as bad as reports from earlier days). At the station they had a small Pokemon shop set up and I purchased an Instinct shirt which I saw at the Yokohama event and wanted. Wanting to avoid the long train lines, we took a local train line in a different direction and are spending the night in a town nearby and will do a little touring tomorrow.Ultimately it was a fun event, but a little exhausting and difficult to get to and in the end not quite worth a lot of the hassle (getting there, the softban that was imposed on me, walking to the dunes, poor weather, and connection problems). I wish there were medals for the events in game, but I didn't receive one for this event or the Yokohama one. The only new things I registered were the S and U unowns, but it was a fun experience none-the-less. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2jp89Of