The Wild, Wild West...of Sweden

  High Chapparral, Sweden
Saturday, June 16, 2007

This weekend, since the weather was a bit dodgy for painting the barn and we had already had a pretty busy week with the pony camp, our host family offered to take us out to High Chapparral, a famous tourist attraction in rural Sweden that promised to be an entertaining time.

Iron Cowboy

Basically, High Chapparel is an Old West town, it really was very surreal.  They've painstakingly recreated an entire Old West town (supposedly based on a town in South Dakota), an Indian village and a Mexican town, all linked by a steam train railway, which is complete with armed holdups and shootouts....all in the middle of rural Sweden.  You even pass herds of buffalo on the way between the towns!  They had a huge array of people in costumes walking around the town, as well as a guy dressed like Lucky Luke (remember that old cowboy cartoon?!) who was a big hit with the many kids visiting that day, all of whom were also dressed like little cowboys and toting cap guns.   

Lucky Luke Corners the Crims

The bizarre thing is, for the sake of authenticity they actually import people to come and work at this place for the summer, so all the people working in the Mexican town were actually from Mexico, and the Indians were (wait for it...) from Winnipeg, Dan's home town!!  We had a long chat with them, it was very funny.  Apparently it's quite good money, and they get to see some of Europe, so they spend the summers here doing Indian dances and playing drums for crowds of Swedish tourists, then work in a furniture store in Winnipeg over the winters.  Several of them had Swedish girlfriends they came back to every summer as well, so there were obviously a few fringe benefits!!  

Shootout in the Main Street

The whole place was a crack up, it was very entertaining people watching, since there were obviously a lot of people who took the whole thing very seriously.  Apparently during the summer families can rent a cabin nearby and just spend all day wandering around the place dressed up like cowboys, so it was hard to tell who was actually working there and who was just, well, a weirdo.  Everyone was very friendly, and the Wild West Show was fantastic (complete with a huge shootout in the main street and people plummeting from balconies and rooftops, all in Swedish, of course).

Wanted, 500 Kroner Reward

Very, very entertaining, like spending the day in a cartoon, really....

All our best from Sweden,
Dan and Gabrielle