Close friends to random strangers (for some friends kept telling their friends about me and my mission) know that for the last five weeks I have been missioning it around London chasing down … Elephants! This year, for a limited time only, London has been home to nearly 260 elephant statues. Locating and hunting them down has caused tears, injuries to limbs, tearing of hair (from the parents letting their kids climb over the elephants), blisters, and fending off an angry Mickey Mouse it has been so very worth it to hunt down every single one of them.

The Elephant Family is a small charity working to save the Asian elephant from extinction in the wild. The Elephant Parade has previously been in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam though I don’t think it has had such a big impact as is has had in London. If Facebook posts are to be believed (yes I did join their page) people came from all over the world simply for the sole purpose of seeing these elephants. It was a fantastic campaign and I hope it really succeeds in raising the money it needs.

Tracking down these nearly 260 elephants has been quite a journey in the last 5 weeks (pictures were snapped of these jolly creatures on 19 days, with eight different friends, and with miles walked.) I tried to be as strategic as possible to cut down on wasted travel (sometimes even planning events around where the elephants were!) but sometimes the elephants weren’t there when they were supposed to be, or the map changed and the elephants moved, or the elephants were in hospital! On the other hand, sometimes it worked to my advantage too like when the elephant that was supposed to go to Heathrow Terminal 5 ended up sitting at the Paddington train platform instead.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy my time elephant hunting. In addition to meeting fellow elephant hunters I really enjoyed trekking around London and visiting places I’d never been to – it was a new way of discovering London that’s for sure. The elephants themselves were also a wonder in their own right. Various artists had volunteered to decorate them and I could go on all day (it would probably take as long as it took me to find them all) about the themes, the smart concepts and just pure inspiration that some of these elephants entailed.

My absolute favourite (and it was very very hard indeed to narrow it down) had to be #255 The City in the Elephant by the BFLS architects – ingeniously they’d put a literal city of elephants inside the elephant! From afar it looks merely like an elephant with bubbles:

But a closer look reveals something altogether unexpected:

My next favourite was maybe #184 The Human Disease by Nathan McKenna. I think it speaks for itself:

One elephant featured my home country:

Some elephants had a lot of bling (with some people even resorting to try and pick that bling off!)

And who doesn’t love cheese:

There were tributes to women:

The monopoly elephant was way impressive:

Finding the small details on the elephants was cool:

Last but not least were all the London themed elephants

The parade, however, was not without controversy. Gerald, initially sitting in a Selfridges window, apparently had something a little adult about the leaves painted on him. Something to do with one of them looking like a lady part! After the first week he was put away before emerging at China White, where you could see him by appointment only. I personally didn’t see what was so offensive about it:

Now I just have to figure out what I’m going to do with the photos of all 258 elephants …