Mumbai will be hosting several Pokémon Go walks this month, allowing users to experience the city while catching the elusive pocket monsters
After food walks and heritage walks, the latest trend in Mumbai now seem to be Pokémon Go walks. Over the course of this month, ingenious fans of the game will be organising walks and crawls across localities — all with the aim of catching Pokémon and levelling up.
Pawan Shahri of Latenight Mumbai, who is organising a Pokémon meet up along with a bar crawl in Lower Parel, says, “We’re ’90s kids who’ve grown up on a diet of Pokémon, and there are also people who love going for bar crawls in the city. We work towards giving people a lot more activities to do around the city while exploring new venues. So we thought this was the perfect way to give people the Pokémon activity they love, along with a bar crawl.”
Tany Joseph, who created one of the first event page for a Pokémon walk says that he only wanted a couple of people to join in initially. “I wanted to go explore these Pokestops, and just like Ash, the central character of Pokémon has his friends Brock and Misty with him, I wanted a couple of my friends to accompany me too. I made an event page and then thousands of people decided to join me for the walk.”
While this might seem like a new idea for Mumbai, there have been several such walks organised in the US already. Saurabh Punamia of Mumbai Riders says, “My friends told me of these walks across New York’s Central Park and other places, and we wondered why couldn’t we have them in Mumbai too.” Saurabh and his team are organising a midnight walk in Bandra to catch Pokémon, and have mapped out localities to visit in order to make the best of Pokéstops, locations that will let you replenish your supply of goodies.
While going out and catching Pokémon in a group sounds like a great idea, it’s not always possible for everyone to net some creatures everywhere. All of the organisers, however, plan to use the lure module of the game to attract Pokémon towards the crowds. Saurabh says, “You either need to be on level 8 or purchase these lure modules to pull Pokémon towards you. That way, everyone gets hold of a Pokémon.”
For Mumbai Riders and Latenight Mumbai, this has turned into a chance to get the walkers to explore the city alongside being successful Pokémon trainers. While the latter’s PokéGo walk will include hopping bars, Mumbai Riders hopes to visit the quaint bylanes of Bandra and talk about the city while walking.
“This is just the first of many crawls we’ve planned,” says Pawan. “Next month we plan to do one in Bandra and Andheri too.” Saurabh says that the next step will probably be cycling in the city while grabbing Pokémon. He, however, stresses hard on paying attention while playing the game. “The biggest ‘don’t’ for our event is that don’t lose focus of your surroundings while you play Pokémon Go. Ours is a midnight walk, so we’re not very worried about the traffic, but paying attention to where you’re going and walking is a must.”
Mumbai Riders’ Midnight Pokéwalk is scheduled on July 11, and will start at 11 pm in Bandra. Tany Joseph’s Pokéwalk is on July 23, and will start at Burger King, Churchgate at 5 pm. Latenight Mumbai’s PokéGo Bar Crawl is on July 29, and will start at 6 pm in Lower Parel.
