We hope this will bring smiles and memories to you and serve as inspiration to come to Sweden for others.

Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpUx7kytwvk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7yODQZgwMw

The rest of the evening with great music and dancing proved to be one of the most fun filled OAS evenings ever! Cheers everyone!

Of course with a well deserved coffee and cinnamon bun break afterwards

The group who stayed out another night with the canoes learned how to pan for gold!

Their teacher has 37 World Gold panning Championships medals so he knew what he was doing. Just look at the photos. It was like a gold rush out there!

After the floating timber raft dinner we took a quick bus ride to the Bredsjö mansion where we would stay the night, have a workshop the next day and where we would spend the final dinner.

We were greeted by one of the most spectacular sunsets I’ve ever seen!

The rafts we had recently built were made up of 60 timber logs each weighing about 1000kg. This raft that took 15 of us was huge! It could easily have handled twice as many people so we had plenty or room with two long tables, plenty of Primus grills and lots of good food and drink. We were in the safe and merry company of the owners of Hellefors Herrgård who organises these kind of raft dinners all the time.

At the end of the 2-3 hour slow floating dinner we suddenly heard the faint sound of a violin playing hauntingly beautiful further down stream. Behold! A naked man playing the fiddle! (no pun intended). It was Näcken himself.

Dear Outdoor Ambassadors of Sweden!

Thank you very much for your participation at OAS in Värmland.
Now I am back in the office and it feels empty that you all have gone back to your home countries…

I really hope you had some interesting and useful experiences from your stay. If you have any questions concerning Värmland or Sweden don’t hesitate to contact me.

This OAS blog will continue to update this and next week with stories, photos and eventually video! Keep coming back to check it out. Don’t forget to write comments, be it a few lines of your experiences or just a hello to the other participants. It is great to see that you’ve been there and left a foot print.
The photos are also uploaded to Facebook and we would like to encourage you to go there and “tag” yourself if you appear in the photos.
Click here to see the photos on Facebook.

Finally, if you want to share photos or video with us and allow us to upload them to flickr, Facebook and the blog, we’d really appreciate it. Tommy and Fredrik couldn’t be in every place at every great photo opportunity so you probably have some great photos as well If you want to share photos or video send them to Tommy Sollén (tommy.sollen@visitsweden.com). Since they are probably too big for emails you might want to use a service like http://www.yousendit.com/ (free up to 100Mb) or something similar.

As we say in Swedish, Välkommen tillbaka (Welcome back)

Jenny

After we had paddled our canoes to the lunch site and made a fish soup and relaxed a bit Aulis Syväjärvi joined us to teach us about the moose (or elk). How to call it with sounds and how to track it.

Aulis Syväjärvi also told us stories of the area to put our presence there into perspective. He taught us the sound how to call the moose and how to sound as a moose cow. He then took us into the forest to show us how to track it. I think it is safe to say that Aulis Syväjärvi spellbound all of us with his calm authority and charisma and that his teachings were fun and inspirational.

After quite a cold night in the tentipis (-5 Celsius!) we slowly warmed up over breakfast and coffee and headed out by bus to the next activity; canoeing!

This day the group would split up into two groups. One would continue to canoe in the evening and spend another night outside while the other group would canoe and bicycle a little bit before a floating raft dinner and a visit to a mansion. But more about that later.

So far we’re all paddling together along Svartälven (“Black river”, 125km long) downstream and with the wind in our backs. It was easy going in pleasant weather. Although after 2.5 hours I did feel the need to stretch my legs so finding the lunch site was where we would make some fish soup was a great feeling indeed