Canada-WhereToGo.txt

WHERE TO GO
W ith a country this big, how do you get to know the place as a whole? The answer is, of course, that you can’t. Not even most Canadians will have seen all that you will see on a well-planned trip. A visit to Canada aiming at anything more than just one destination — Toronto, Montréal, or Vancouver — is bound to seem a little intimidating. The distances to cover are enormous. But it can be done, with the journey itself a large part of the adventure, as you zoom across the wide-open spaces separating one city from another. The Handy Travel Tips section, beginning on page 218, gives detailed practical guidance, but here are some general ideas to help you plan your trip.
On a first visit, you’ll probably be able to get a feel for just a few of the regions we describe, but you can capture the essence of Canada in a judicious combination of two or three major cities and the marvelous outdoor life. We do not attempt an encyclopedic coverage of every nook and cranny from the U.S. border to the Arctic Circle, but we do provide a representative sample of the country’s attractions.
Where
We’ve divided the country into six regions, each with at least one major town accessible by air as a “launching pad” from which to explore the hinterland: Ontario; Québec; the Atlantic (Newfoundland and the Maritimes); British Columbia; the Rockies and the Prairie Provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba); and the North (Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories).
Two suggested plans of attack are either to start in Toronto or Montréal and take in Ontario and Québec, with side trips to the Atlantic coast or even out to the West; or to start in Vancouver or Calgary and explore the Rockies and British Columbia before heading east to Ontario or Québec, taking in the Prairies on a cross-country train ride. The North, on a first trip, must be considered a proposition strictly for the adventurous. In any case, count on at least three weeks, ideally a month, to even begin to do the place justice.
When
One of the great advantages to Canada’s vast size is that, apart from a couple of major tourist attractions such as Niagara Falls, it’s never overcrowded. Even in high summer there’s still plenty of room for everybody. Nonetheless, it is advisable to make advance bookings for some resort hotels on the Pacific coast, in the Rockies, or around the Great Lakes.
July and August guarantee the best weather, though it can get very hot in Montréal, Toronto, and the Prairie Provinces (aggravated in those provinces by the hot chinook wind off the Rockies). Farther to the north, mosquitoes can be a problem in summer. Connoisseurs of the forests of Québec and the Maritimes favor the spectacular autumn from September to mid-October. While the West Coast is mild in May and June, in central and eastern Canada you’ll still find snow on the ground in May and a nip in the air into the month of June. The period from November to April is strictly for winter sports enthusiasts.
Remember the old adage: There’s no bad weather, only bad clothing. In addition to your light summer wear, be sure to bring a sweater for the occasional chilly evenings. Rather than weighing down your luggage with anything cumbersome, take a leaf out of the Canadians’ book and keep warm by wearing several layers. If you’re thinking of going north, consider long underwear. In any case, don’t forget a raincoat, especially for British Columbia. Important everywhere is a good pair of walking shoes — something light but more solid than tennis shoes.
How
The most adventurous traveler who loves to improvise will still need a certain amount of advance planning. Canada’s provincial tourist offices are conscientious and well worth consulting, even before you leave home. The national tourist office is also helpful, but in Canada the provinces jealously protect their prerogatives against the federal government, and maintain their own tourist offices that can give you detailed information about resorts, accommodations, camping, and sports facilities.
To cover half a continent, air travel is invaluable. To get the cheapest deal, plan the broad outlines of your itinerary ahead of time so that you can buy your tickets before you reach Canada. The two national airlines, Air Canada and Canadian (each linked to smaller companies flying the interior), have cut-rate, multiple-flight ticketing. Helicopters and hydroplanes can fly you for fishing and camping expeditions in the more remote areas. Do take advantage of the boat cruises wherever you can — around Newfoundland, Halifax harbor, the Great Lakes, or the Inside Passage off the Pacific coast.
For a closer look at all the wide-open spaces, take a train. VIA Rail Canada is the national passenger-train system using the tracks of Canadian Pacific and Canadian National, who devote themselves strictly to more lucrative freight carrying. Serving pretty good food in comfortable diners, with club cars, observation decks, and sleeping cars, VIA takes a leisurely four days from Montréal to Vancouver. (From Montréal to Toronto it’s 51⁄2 hours, faster by train than by road.) You may also want to consider Rocky Mountaineer Railtours (tel. [phone], <www.rockymountaineer.com>), which offers daylight trips through the Canadian Rockies.
Buses are a possibility for the occasional excursion, but a car remains essential for independent mobility. The airlines will arrange for car rentals at each airport. The Trans-Canada Highway stretches nearly 8,000 km (4,800 miles) from coast to coast, and secondary roads are very good until you get into the backwoods. Inside the major cities, you may prefer to park your car and use the generally efficient public transport. One of the best ways to explore the hinterland, especially in the national and provincial parks, is to rent a comfortably equipped mobile home or camper. This, too, should be done in advance.
ONTARIO
This choice piece of real estate between the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay is the country’s dominant province — too dominant for the liking of many of the others. With 10 million people clustered almost entirely along the southern border, Ontario is the most populous province and the wealthiest, generating close to 40 percent of the gross national product from manufacturing, construction, minerals, forestry, and agriculture. The province has grown in vitality with the influx of Italian, German, Portuguese, Caribbean, Indian, and Pakistani immigrants, reducing the once overwhelming “British” majority to barely 50 percent. If Ontarians are known for their bumptious spirit, they certainly have something to be bumptious about in their province’s burgeoning towns and the riches of its farmlands, forests, and lakes.
Not content with taking over from Montréal as the nation’s business capital, Toronto is surging forward with a vigorous cultural and social life. Bemused visitors from across the border note how it has been possible to create a vibrant modern metropolis without the hassles of inner-city blight and violence. As the national capital, Ottawa is the inevitable butt of jokes against its federal government bureaucracy, but patriots revere its parliament and museums preserving Canada’s cultural treasures.
Niagara Falls, Ontario, has, to the chagrin of many American tour operators, the best grandstand view of one of the Western World’s great natural wonders. Southern Ontario’s countryside is a gentle green delight enhanced by two theater festivals, the Shaw festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Shakespeare festival at Stratford. Cruise around the Great Lakes, try the watersports on Georgian Bay, and explore the Thousand Islands or Point Pelee nature reserve.
Ontario’s history is preserved in lovingly reconstructed villages and forts marking the passage of French Jesuit missionaries at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons, a fur-trading post at Thunder Bay, military positions at Fort George (Niagara) and Fort Henry (Kingston), and the pioneer communities at Upper Canada Village (Morrisburg) and Black Creek (Toronto).
Toronto
Ethnically diverse, Toronto is Canada’s largest city, home to 4.3 million people. Hard to believe that this gleaming citadel of big business and the good urban life was a malarial swamp in the 1790s. Muddy York once could be recommended only by its commanding position on Lake Ontario, from which Fort York guarded the troublesome American border. Today, the mud is neatly paved over, the mosquitoes have flown elsewhere, and the Americans are less trouble than they used to be. Yonge Street, the military highway that founder John Simcoe thrust north from the fort to Lake Simcoe, starts out now as downtown Toronto’s main commercial artery. Its intersection at the elegant shopping thoroughfare, Bloor Street, is the fashionable hub of the city.
Following John Simcoe’s military grid pattern, Toronto’s main arteries run from the lakefront north: Spadina and University Avenues, Bay, Yonge, and Church Streets; and east–west: Front, King, Queen, Dundas, College-Carlton, and Bloor Streets. Our sightseeing itinerary starts down at the waterfront and works north through the business district to the chic shopping and museum area. As an alternative, especially if you have children, you may prefer to start downtown, around Union Station, and visit the other sights to the north before coming back to relax among the recreational attractions of the waterfront. Getting around the city is quite simple, but while downtown, park your car and walk or use the buses or subway.
Waterfront Area
You might face severe punishment from those very proud Torontonians if you don’t begin your waterfront tour with a trip up the CN Tower. This handsome, outsize TV antenna makes up for its unimaginative name (from its builder, the Canadian National railway and telecommunications company) with all the fanciful interpretations of its shape: jousting lance, hypodermic needle, serpent frozen rigid while swallowing a football. At 605 m (1,815 ft), it is currently the world’s highest freestanding structure, 19 m (56 ft) more than a similar monster in Moscow.
A plexiglass elevator whizzes you up the outside of the tower to two observation decks in the Skypod. The ride is free for those going to the revolving restaurant or nightclub (which also rank as the world’s highest, if you don’t count a couple in the Rockies, Alps, and Himalayas). The view at the top reveals a whole history of Toronto in the contrast between the glass-and-steel skyscraper canyons of the financial district, the geometric dome and cantilevered structures of the Ontario Place leisure complex, and the old-fashioned gabled houses of the neighborhoods.
Take a second elevator to the Space Deck, to get the full sweep of Lake Ontario’s so-called “Golden Horseshoe.” Including Toronto, this dense urban belt from Oshawa in the east to Hamilton and St. Catharines in the west houses half the total population of the province. More romantically, you can catch a glimpse of Niagara Falls and peer across the border to Buffalo.
After years of neglect, when it served only the lake’s loading docks, railway depots, and factories, the waterfront has become a major attraction for Torontonians at play.
Harbourfront is a bright new neighborhood reclaimed from a swampy wasteland, at the foot of the CN Tower. Rundown warehouses and factories have been transformed into art galleries, bars, restaurants, boutiques, a sailing school, playgrounds in the park, and, more recently, chic apartments. Young upwardly mobile peddlers of old and new-old china and other bric-a-brac on Queen’s Quay West call their flea market the Harbourfront Antique Market. The Canadian Railway Museum at Spadina Pier exhibits some of the earliest engines to cross the continent. For a thorough view of the port facilities, take the harbor boat tour organized by the Toronto Harbor Commission.
Facing Harbourfront, the breezy beaches and picnic areas of the Toronto Islands offer another handy escape from the city bustle. They were part of the Scarborough Bluffs peninsula until storms and floods in the mid-19th century broke them up into islands, joined today by bridges. Ferryboats leave from the docks behind the Hilton Harbor Castle Hotel at the foot of Yonge Street, calling at the three main islands. No cars are allowed, but you can rent a bicycle, downtown or on Centre Island. The latter is the most popular with Torontonians, and its beaches are particularly crowded on weekends. In July, it is the major focus of the great West Indian Festival of Caribana, celebrating those other islands’ extravagant costumes and music, featuring steel band, calypso, and reggae. Quieter Ward’s Island, at the eastern end, is more residential; you can join the locals for their daily constitutional on the boardwalk. Swimmers tend to favor the beach at Hanlan’s Point, to the west, behind the Toronto Island Airport.
Jutting out from the grounds of the annual Canadian National Exhibition (“Ex” to locals; held in late August), the ultramodern recreation complex of Ontario Place is built on three man-made islands. It combines the atmospheres of a theme park and a cultural center.
Its most outstanding landmark is the white geodesic dome of the Cinesphere. On a six-story-high circular screen, it shows superb documentary films of spectacular natural phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions or the latest advances in earth and space exploration. Pedalos are a delightfully lazy way of getting a duck’s eye view of the attractions. Energetic 4- to 14-year-olds love the Children’s Village, complete with trampoline and waterslide, and toddlers can splash around in the duck ponds. Before you move on, put your drenched kids through the huge “dryer” shaped like a bird. The older crowd gathers at the Molson Canadian Ampitheatre to listen to rock concerts or heads for the outdoor ForumAmpitheatre, seating 11,000 spectators for its classical, jazz, and rock concerts. The best way to ensure good seats for the top attractions is to picnic on the grass before the show begins.
Moored at the entrance to the park is the Canadian warship H.M.C.S. Haida, a destroyer active in World War II and the Korean War named after the peace-loving Haida Indians of British Columbia. You’ll find sea cadets on board to answer your questions.
Nearby, the Marine Museum of Upper Canada (Exhibition Place, just west of Princes’ Gate) traces the history of shipping on the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, with all the brass and wooden paraphernalia of the old vessels in addition to some beautiful scale models.
If patriots make a reverent pilgrimage to Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame (just off Lakeshore Boulevard West at Exhibition Place) to salute heroic athletes of the past, the separate Hockey Hall of Fame provides a tonic lesson for American visitors to recall, among the trophies, masks, skates, and hockey sticks, the fact that nearly all their ice hockey heroes are Canadian-born. With the many splits between Anglo- and French-Canadians, Protestants and Catholics, ice hockey is the closest thing the country has to a state religion.
Of all the many historic sites carefully preserved and prettied up around the country, Old Fort York (Garrison Road off Fleet Street between Bathurst Street and Strachan Avenue) has one of the most bizarre locations, sandwiched between the Gardner Expressway and the railway tracks. When Lieutenant Governor Simcoe built it in 1793, it commanded a strategic position directly on the lakeshore, facing potential attack from across the American border. In the War of 1812, retreating British forces chose to destroy it rather than let it fall into American hands. It was rebuilt in 1841 and restored in 1934 as a tourist attraction, with a diorama of the Battle of York and authentically furnished 19th-century officers’ quarters, log cabins, and military surgery. In summertime, you can watch troops parading in the British Army’s famous scarlet uniforms, performing bayonet drills and firing their muskets.
Heart of Downtown
The essence of Toronto, old and new, is concentrated around Union Station. It was inaugurated by the Prince of Wales in 1927, when stations were still built like Greek temples (Corinthian pillars, heroic statues, and ceramic-tiled ceilings); it is one last proud fanfare for the transcontinental railways that founded the country’s industrial prosperity. In this headquarters city of Canadian National railways, the station also symbolized Toronto’s position as a major commercial and industrial center. Across the street, the venerable Royal York hotel, refurbished to something of its 1929 grandeur, provides a businessmen’s palace as appropriate counterpart. It is linked to the station by a large underground concourse of shops and banks.
If the station and its hotel showed where Toronto was heading, the bright new Metro Toronto Convention Center to the west proclaims the city’s triumphant arrival. Its amenities include all the latest electronic technology for audiovisual and communications services, three main halls for up to 12,000 conventioneers, banquet halls, Grand Ball Room, and sports facilities to stretch those tired executive muscles.
Providing a cultural counterpoint a block north of the Convention Center, Vancouver architect Arthur Erickson’s transparent Roy Thomson Hall glows at night to show off the throngs of smart concert-goers attending the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The more middlebrow entertainment of bouncy Broadway musicals can be had at the nearby Edwardian Royal Alexandra Theatre. This, along with the popular old-fashioned restaurants next door, was restored by discount retailing tycoon Ed Mirvish, who later endeared himself to the British theater public by renovating London’s Old Vic.
The Bay Street financial district, “Inland” from Union Station, accentuates the town’s evolution. Almost all the Neo-Classical limestone and marble monuments enshrining the old banks and stock exchange have been replaced by glittering steel-and-glass towers and tiered pyramids. Royal Bank Plaza, at the corner of Front and Bay Streets, reflects the new prosperity in the gilded glass of its windows (treated with some real gold). The vast lobby and atrium of the interior are correspondingly opulent, a dazzling play of cascade, ponds, and greenery beneath a décor of thousands of aluminum cylinders, the work of Venezuelan sculptor Jesús Raphael Soto. While the plaza’s architect Boris Zerafa is a gifted “local boy,” Toronto’s other banks have not hesitated to bring in talents of international renown.
In starkly austere but elegant contrast to the Royal Bank’s exuberance is German Bauhaus master Mies van der Rohe’s five black steel towers for the Toronto Dominion Centre (between Wellington and King Streets). Immediately to the east in Commerce Court is an exhilarating 57-story glass-and-stainless-steel tower by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, designer of the new wing of Washington’s National Gallery and the Great Pyramid for the Louvre museum in Paris.
Completing the financial picture north of the Dominion Center is First Canadian Place, Canada’s tallest office building. In one tower is the Bank of Montréal, reached across a pleasant green courtyard with smart shops around the waterfall. The second tower houses the infinitely more boisterous, modern Toronto Stock Exchange. Behind the Exchange Tower is a trading pavilion with an observation deck from which you can watch the frenetic transactions. Best hours are between 10am and 2pm. Mammon keeps company with the muses in the Exchange Lobby where, against a handsome setting of sculptures, paintings, and Art Deco design, computer monitors give the latest prices from around the world.
A bustling underground network of concourses and escalators links the major buildings of the financial district to create a whole other neighborhood of shopping malls, cinemas, and restaurants, providing warm shelter in the winter and air-conditioned relief in the humid summer.
East of Yonge Street along Front, the Hummingbird Centre for the Performing Arts is a less-than-graceful concrete bunker that is home to the National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian Opera Company. Next door, Canadian drama, both contemporary and classical, is given pride of place at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts. A block away at Jarvis Street, the sprawling indoor-outdoor St. Lawrence Market is open Tuesdays to Saturdays, with the flea market setting up its stalls here on Sundays. Buskers turn it into something of a genteel English country fair on the weekend. Nearby St. Lawrence Hall, once host to the freaks and darlings of Victorian vaudeville, has been beautifully restored to its original pink and green to provide a second home for the National Ballet.
In a country not renowned for its ecumenical harmony, Church Street lines up the Anglican St. James Cathedral, the United Church’s Metropolitan Church, and the Roman Catholic St. Michael’s Cathedral, each an architectural variation of the Neo-Gothic style of the Victorian era.
North of Queen Street, Nathan Phillips Square, named after a prominent Toronto mayor, is the center of municipal government. In the summer, ethnic communities hold their festivals and parades around the great reflecting pool. In the winter, the pool becomes a skating rink and the focus for ebullient celebrations on New Year’s Eve. Old City Hall, a grand Neo-Gothic stone monument (1899) with clock-tower and gargoyles, has been converted into a courthouse to make way for the striking modern (1965) landmark of New City Hall, designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. Its two gently curving office blocks open like an oyster over a domed “pearl” containing the council chamber. Henry Moore’s statue The Archer adorns the courtyard.
No tour of Toronto’s civic past and present is complete without a pilgrimage over to Bond Street, south of Dundas, to Mackenzie House, home of Toronto’s first and most celebrated mayor (82 Bond St., tel. [phone]). William Lyon Mackenzie, a Dundee-born Scot, lived here after his return from exile for leading a revolt in 1837 (see page 20). In the meticulously restored interior, guides in traditional colonial dress explain the memorabilia of the fiery newspaperman, including the hand-operated flatbed printing press on which he turned out his revolutionary newspaper, The Colonial Advocate.
West of Mackenzie House, at the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets, is one of Toronto’s shopping “musts,” the Eaton Centre. The late-20th-century phenomenon of the giant mall becomes here a spectacular showcase of galleries under an arched glass roof, with fiberglass geese suspended in a refreshing décor of greenery and flowers. 
West of Nathan Phillips Square, beyond tree-lined lawns, is Osgoode Hall, a true jewel of Georgian architecture in white limestone and amber brick, and the seat, since 1832, of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Notice the beautiful wrought-iron “cow gates” put up at the main entrance to keep the cattle out in those early rural days. It may whet your appetite to see a couple of other gracious relics of the Georgian era inside. Visit Campbell House (1822) on the northwest corner of Queen and University Streets. Guides in Colonial Dames’ costumes will show you around the home of Sir William Campbell, Chief Justice of Upper Canada in the 1820s. The Grange can be reached through the basement of the Art Gallery of Ontario (see page 59) at Grange Park. There, costumed guides will help to give you a sense of the grand life enjoyed by members of the much admired and hated Family Compact. The Boultons built this country mansion in 1817, when its grounds stretched more than 3 km (2 miles) from Queen clear up to Bloor Street. Note the fine winding staircase, statuary, and stained-glass windows. Be sure to go downstairs, too, to visit the spacious kitchens. On McCaul Street, across from the Art Gallery, the Village by the Grange tries to recreate something of this old world atmosphere for its boutiques and restaurants.
Queen’s Park and Yorkville
The broad tree-lined University Avenue makes an appropriately dignified and pleasant approach to the High Victorian pink sandstone Provincial Parliament Building and other government offices in the middle of the oval Queen’s Park. Guided tours will show you the principal halls and chambers. From the visitors’ gallery, you can watch provincial parliamentary debates when in session (February to June and October to December).
West of Queen’s Park is the University of Toronto, one of the top colleges in North America, with most of its buildings in traditional Oxbridge Romanesque-and-Gothic. The medical school has maintained a high reputation since its researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best made their discovery of insulin in 1921. The university bookshop — known locally as book rooms — on College Street is the best in town.
Between Avenue Road and Yonge Street north of Bloor is Yorkville, the town’s most appealing district in which to stroll. In a transformation no less dramatic than the Harbourfront, the hippy slum of the 1960s has been refurbished into a chic neighborhood of fashionable boutiques, art galleries, sidewalk cafés, gourmet restaurants, and colorfully repainted old houses. Hazelton Lanes is a delightful variation on the conventional shopping mall, where the maze of walkways and staircases around sunken courtyards is deliberately designed to get you lost until you buy or eat your way out.
You might very easily walk right past the unprepossessing façade of the Metro Toronto Library (on Yonge one block north of Bloor), but the subtly interconnected areas of architect Raymond Moriyama’s striking interior may tempt you to give up your vacation and get down to some solid study. Five floors of book stacks in a décor of orange and burnt sienna surround a brilliant atrium enclosing greenery, a fountain, and a reflector pool, while a transparent elevator zips silently up and down.
Crazy Casa Loma, northwest of Yorkville at 1 Austin Terrace, is Toronto’s answer to California’s Hearst Castle. Its battlements and turrets are all a self-respecting financier like Henry Pellatt could have wished for. After touring the castles of Europe for a few ideas, he built the 98-room mansion in the early 1900s at the then-astronomical cost of $3,500,000. He chose his oak and walnut from North America, teak from Asia, paneling, marble, and glass from Europe. With all its terraces, massive walls, and echoing rooms, it isn’t exactly cozy. That may explain why Pellatt provided himself with a secret escape route through a hidden staircase leading from his study (and now open to the public). Whatever folly of grandeur the financier entertained is best seen in the opulently paneled Oak Room and the stained-glass dome, marble floors, and Italianate bronze doors of the Conservatory. Take the long tunnel from the wine cellar to the stables, where the horses were spoiled silly with a home of Spanish tile and mahogany.
The Ethnic Neighborhoods
In typical North American style, Toronto’s ethnic communities move around as they grow more affluent or as new construction pushes them out. The high-rises and parking garages behind the New City Hall forced Chinatown to move west. This is the largest Chinatown in Canada, if not in all of North America. The community has set up restaurants, hardware stores, and herbal medicine shops along Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue. Look in at the pagoda-roofed China Court shops grouped around a little Chinese garden.
Other ethnic groups — Portuguese, Greeks, Italians, West and East Indians — buy and sell at nearby Kensington Market, west of Spadina. It has the delightful, exotic chaos of a bustling bazaar, most of all on Saturday mornings. The Jews who once inhabited this Kensington Market area have moved to smarter Forest Hill, northwest of Casa Loma. You’ll find souvlaki restaurants and bouzouki music of Little Athens across the Don River on Danforth Avenue, home of the first Italian immigrants. Little Italy, which is actually shared with the Portuguese, is located around Dufferin and St. Clair West.
Museums
Undergoing an ambitious program of renovation, the richly endowed Royal Ontario Museum, popularly known as the ROM (100 Queen’s Park), has won international recognition for its collections of Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities, as well as the art of North American Indians and Inuit.
The magnificent Chinese Collection presents the objects and ornaments of some 3,500 years of civilization, stretching from the Bronze Age Shang Dynasty to the extinction of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912, when China became a republic. The exhibits include ceramic statues of various figures of the imperial court, as well as models of a noble’s house and a Ming tomb. In a refreshing departure from the conventionally dry and scholarly displays of antiquities, the captions on the showcases do a fine job of placing the exhibits in a living context — explaining, for instance, the way a house was designed to deal with the changing elements and seasons, or the religious significance of the figurines that people the tomb.
The bulk of the collection was assembled by fur trader George Crofts after he settled in the port of Tianjin; it was continued after his death in 1925 by the Anglican Bishop of Hunan, William Charles White. The Bishop White Gallery features Buddhist and Taoist frescoes of the 13th-century Yuan Dynasty, under Emperor Kublai Khan, along with some monumental polychrome and gilded wooden statues of the Buddha. 
Across the street from the ROM, the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art offers a very attractive way of acquiring an instant history of ceramics from 2000 b.c. to the 18th century. The huge collection includes pre-Columbian earthenware figures, brilliant Italian Renaissance Majolica, more sedate but elegant Dutch and English Delftware of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Rococo forms of German Meissen porcelain. In front of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), 317 Dundas Street West, an intense Henry Moore bronze, Large Two Forms, proclaims the museum’s outstanding feature: North America’s finest collection of the Briton’s works. The Henry Moore Sculpture Centre occupies a whole wing designed by the artist himself. The 600 pieces of the collection shown on a rotation basis include major works, small-scale bronze models, sketches, and paintings. But it’s the great plaster casts in their sometimes brutal original state that give the visitor a unique opportunity to see a representative sample of the monumental pieces that grace public squares and university quadrangles all over the world. Besides the celebrated reclining figures, look for the formidable skull-like design from which the Nuclear Energy monument was cast for the University of Chicago.
The AGO’s Walker Gallery exhibits sculpture by fellow Briton Barbara Hepworth, as well as Rodin, Dégas, and Maillol. The European collection of paintings includes important works by Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Rubens, Frans Hals, Jan van Goyen, and Poussin. An Ontario collection gives a prominent place to British painters, including Hogarth, Raeburn, Reynolds, and Gainsborough. Among the Impressionists and their followers represented here are Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh. “Moderns” include Matisse, Picasso, and Braque. The Canadian collection provides a comprehensive survey of 200 years of Canadian painting, pride of place going to Emily Carr, Tom Thomson, and members of the influential Group of Seven.
Two museums on the city outskirts are well worth the trip. The marvelously entertaining Ontario Science Centre stands 11 km (6 miles) northeast of the city center (770 Don Mills Rd.). Here, adults and children are expected to participate, and they do so enthusiastically in what turns into a sophisticated push-button play center, focused as much on the future as the past and present —  proving that science can be fun.
The Centre’s design, in a lovely green ravine of the Don River valley, makes an exciting first impression. Architect Raymond Moriyama has linked up the Centre’s several buildings with escalators and passageways like a series of atomic nuclei, comparable to his work on the various spaces and levels of the Metro Toronto Library.
Inside, it’s one thing to remember what your teacher told you about static electricity, and quite another to touch (without risk) the Centre’s 500,000-volt sphere and see your hair stand on end. You can man the controls of a space vehicle for a simulated moon-landing, broadcast your voice clear around the world through a parabolic sound reflector, or find out what goes on off-camera in a fully equipped TV studio.
The McMichael Canadian Collection (in the village of Kleinburg, 25 km/15 miles, 40 minutes’ drive, northwest of Toronto) consecrates the work of one of Canada’s best-known schools of painting, the Group of Seven. These artists of the first half of the 20th century sought the sources of their inspiration in a distinctly Canadian landscape rather than in the derivative themes of European painting. The museum has chosen an appropriate setting of evergreen forest overlooking the Humber valley for its location. The stone and log building is itself, in more solid form, a visual reference to the log cabins of the country’s earliest settlers. Look out, too, for the Inuit and Indian art, most notably the work of Norval Morrisseau, a Midéwiwin Indian from northern Ontario whose works explore traditional subjects with a modern abstract technique.
Black Creek Pioneer Village
Here, 20 km (12 miles) northwest of downtown Toronto at Jane Street and Steeles Avenue, conservationists have re-created an 1860s farm and an early Ontario log-cabin village. In horse-drawn carts you visit costumed villagers tilling and harvesting, sheep-shearing, grinding flour in the mill, weaving, and fashioning horseshoes in the smithy. Home-cooked meals are served at the posthouse inn. 
Niagara Peninsula
The 90-minute drive from Toronto to Niagara Falls (130 km/81 miles south of Toronto) curves around the west end of Lake Ontario through the province’s industrial heartland — Mississauga, Hamilton, and St. Catharines, known as the Golden Horseshoe. If you want to see the Falls without getting entangled overnight in the mob scene of the tourists (12 million visitors annually), stay over in the quieter town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, a mere half-hour drive away.
Niagara Falls
The true marvel of Niagara is how nature manages to triumph over tawdry commercialism, perhaps less strident on the Canadian than on the American side of the border marked by the Falls. No amount of pushy peddlers or tacky pink honeymoon motels (if you do stay overnight, ask to see one of the hilarious bridal suites) can diminish the spectacle of that mass of white water taking its awesome plunge on the way from Lake Erie towards Lake Ontario and the Atlantic.
Mere statistics — an average of 2,830 cubic m (100,000 cubic ft) of water per second generating 4 million kilowatts of energy — convey nothing of the falls’ immensity, but a close-up view is unforgettable. The Niagara River divides in fact into two major cascades around Goat Island: to the east, American Falls (61 m/184 ft high with a crestline of 350 m/1,076 ft) and to the west, the more dramatic Canadian Horseshoe Falls (58 m/177 ft high with a curving crestline of 670 m/2,214 ft), and a smaller cascade off to the side, known as Bridal Veil.
There are several vantage points from which to view the Falls. Table Rock, named after a ledge that’s long since fallen in the river, is right on the brink of Horseshoe Falls. Down below, the Table Rock Scenic Tunnels take you behind the mighty wall of water. With the price of the ticket, you borrow some protective clothing, but nothing is totally waterproof against Niagara. Don’t let that worry you — seeing Niagara and not getting wet would be silly. Just keep a dry change of clothing in the car. A boat tour below the falls in one of the three vessels that go by the name of Maid of the Mist takes you past and damply close to both falls. The Spanish Aero cable car gives you a bird’s-eye view of the Niagara Whirlpool rapids. For an overall view, try the Skylon and Minolta towers.
Away from the hustle and hype, Queen Victoria Park is a delight for hikers, cyclists, and picnickers — even cross-country skiers in winter, when the falls take on a much more romantic look, all the more so for being relatively deserted. In spring, the park gardens put on a magnificent show of daffodils, tulips, magnolias, and roses, and diners in the park restaurant get a great view of the falls’ nighttime illuminations.
Niagara-on-the-Lake
A meandering 30-km (18-mile) riverside drive north along the lovely tree-lined Niagara Parkway takes you from the tumult of the tourist buses to the tranquillity of this old Loyalist bastion. The town, settled by refugees from the American Revolution in 1792 and briefly capital of Upper Canada, jealously preserves an image of a “British” way of life revisited by North American nostalgia. The main street, Queen Street, pays tribute to the Anglo-Saxon myth with its clock tower, white clapboard and red-brick houses, the grand Prince of Wales Hotel, tea shops serving buns and buttered scones, and the lovingly restored Niagara Apothecary (1866) displaying old-fashioned medicine jars in walnut cabinets under ornamental crystal gaslights.
On the quiet avenues off the main street, you can taste something of the genteel life in some delightful little boarding houses that supplement the usual hotels. They operate principally from May to October, when the town hosts the popular Shaw Festival. Works of George Bernard Shaw and other major playwrights are performed in the modern Festival Theatre (Wellington Street and Queen’s Parade Road), with its pleasant garden for a cocktail between acts. A couple of smaller theaters put on musical comedies and light revues.
On the outskirts of town, Fort George, the British garrison on the Niagara frontier during the 1812 War, destroyed by the Americans, was restored in the 1940s. A rebuilt stockade of six earth and log bastions connected by a wooden palisade surrounds workshops, hospital, kitchens, and the original 1796 stone powder house. Infantry drills are staged in the summer.
Apart from B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, the Niagara peninsula is Canada’s only serious wine-growing area, not comparable with Bordeaux or Burgundy, but still respectable. At St. David’s, southwest of town, you can visit the Cháteau des Charmes winery and taste for yourself.
Stratford
Situated in the heart of the peninsula, 130 km (78 miles) or 2 hours’ drive from Toronto, Stratford town is well worth a visit for its celebrated Stratford Festival spanning the whole tourist season, from May to November. Since Tyrone Guthrie opened the festival in a tent in 1953, Shakespeare and other English classics such as Sheridan and Marlowe have been given pride of place. Their home is now the apron-staged Festival Theatre, while the Avon Theatre and Third Stage put on alternative fare, offering jazz and chamber-music concerts as well as a chance to discover Canadian playwrights.
Every effort is made to sustain an Elizabethan atmosphere, with curtain times heralded by trumpeters in Renaissance doublet and hose. Picnic in Queen’s Park and give your crumbs to the ducks and swans on Victoria Lake. A Shakespearean Garden displays the flowers mentioned by the Bard in his sonnets and plays.
Point Pelee National Park
At the southern end of the peninsula, indeed the southernmost point of the Canadian mainland, Point Pelee is one of the most distinctive of the country’s nature reserves. It’s on the same latitude as northern California or Rome, and so endowed with a most un-Canadian climate and vegetation that offer a hospitable crossroads for 347 species of birds on their biannual north–south migrations.
“Bald point,” as French explorers dubbed it, is the southern half of a 20-km (12-mile) sandspit jutting out into Lake Erie. Its terrain is a mixture of marshland, forest, meadows, and sandy beaches. Beginning with a lookout tower for bird-watchers, a circular boardwalk takes you out onto the marshes to observe the flight of the redwing blackbird and purple martin, while bittern stay tucked away in the reeds. Look, too, for the pretty pink-blossomed swamp rose-mallow, unique to Point Pelee. Well-marked bicycle and hiking trails wind through the woods, where you’ll see hackberry, sassafras, sycamore, black walnut, and red cedar, many of the trees draped with hanging vines reminiscent of the American Carolinas.
In the spring, the great sport is fishing for smelt during their spawning run, ending the day with a communal fish-fry on the beach. In September, even before the leaves turn, trees go bright orange with the wings of millions of Monarch butterflies on their way to Mexico.
Lakes Huron and Superior
Ontario’s playgrounds, weekend cottages, and marinas hug the shores and islands of the upper Great Lakes, offering resort hotel facilities. The more adventurous campers, hikers, and canoeists can explore the national and provincial parks for a taste of the northern interior’s wilderness.
Georgian Bay
The bay practically forms a separate lake. These old stamping grounds of the Huron Indians (until they were decimated by Iroquois warriors and European disease) are now a popular weekend and summer destination for the families of Toronto professionals.
The town of Midland is the center of the Huron region. Its Huronia Museum and Gallery of Historic Huronia and the copy of a Huron village in Little Lake Park illustrate the simple lifestyle of the native peoples before the arrival of the Jesuits in the 17th century. West of town, Sainte-Marie among the Hurons is a reconstruction of the Jesuit mission built in 1639. Today, besides some (real) Huron Indians, costumed students show you how the community functioned with priests, carpenters, gardeners, and blacksmiths. It’s worth beginning your visit with the half-hour documentary film to understand the dramatic fate of the mission. It must be said that the Huron were less interested in conversion to Christianity than in the goods to be gained from the fur traders who followed the priests on this first French settlement in Ontario. But dealing directly with Europeans threatened the position of the rival Iroquois as middlemen between the Huron (and Algonquin) and the Dutch and British traders down in Albany, New York. The Iroquois killed thousands of Huron in all-out war, and two Jesuits, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were tortured to death. To halt the Iroquois advance, the French community of 300 burned their own village and returned to Québec.
The simple little Church of St. Joseph contains the tombs of the martyred missionaries. A museum outside the stockade depicts the life of the 17th-century French-Canadians, including the artifacts and birchbark canoes of the fur traders.
The dramatic landscapes of the Georgian Bay Islands National Park, a particular favorite of the Group of Seven, now attract fishermen, scuba divers, and other watersports enthusiasts. The bay’s islands are said to number 30,000, if you include all the rocky outcrops and tree-clumped sandbanks, and the park includes 77 of the most attractive of these islands.
Midland and Tobermory offer boat cruises and shuttle services out to individual islands. Beausoleil Island, off Honey Harbor just outside Midland, is the focus or launching pad of the islands park, very well equipped for camping (there are no restaurant facilities on any of the islands, so be sure to take your own supplies). The Tobermory Islands are renowned for their rock formations, most notably Flowerpot Island, where tall limestone monoliths have been eroded into bizarre vase-like shapes.
Thunder Bay
For vacationers, this town strategically located on Lake Superior’s northwest shore is a springboard to the national parks of Ontario’s interior. But it’s also worth taking a look first at the impressive port facilities of this western terminus of the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes Seaway, which has given Thunder Bay its second name: the Lakehead. Freighters come 3,200 km (1,920 miles) inland from the Atlantic to take on grain shipments from the Prairie Provinces or bring other heavy cargo to all points west in both Canada and the United States. Starting out from the centrally located North Marina, a harbor cruise takes you around the gigantic fortress-like grain silos for a close-up view of the ships in dock. A longer cruise from the same marina follows the Kaministikwia River to Old Fort William (20 minutes by car), the handsomely reconstructed trading post of the Nor’Westers, intrepid rivals of the Hudson’s Bay Company (see page 16). Sheep graze the courtyard lawns, bread is still made in the bakery, and the cookhouse provides lusty country fare. In the company store you’ll see the kind of simple copper and pewter utensils and steel knives that were more precious than gold to the Midéwiwin Indians bringing in their beaver pelts.
Just up the road, 40 km (25 miles) northwest of Thunder Bay, the beautiful Kakabeka Falls is surrounded by its own provincial park providing a quiet natural setting that’s a far cry from Niagara. A boardwalk takes you through the woods along the Kaministikwia River and across a bridge for a view of the falls from both sides. The 151-m (154-ft) cascade flows at its fullest in spring and autumn when the hydrostations don’t slow it down. There are good facilities for camping and bathing.
Canoeists and hikers really intent on getting away from civilization head two hours west of Thunder Bay along Highway 11 to the Quetico Provincial Park. This is the country through which the Nor’Westers’ coureurs de bois paddled their way to the Indian trappers’ remote camps, adopting the natives’ lore for tackling the wilderness, including their snowshoes, toboggans, and birchbark canoes. The indigenous peoples have been here for 9,000 years and have left their colored pictographs of moose, caribou, bears, and turtles etched in the granite cliffs.
The only road into the park leads to the Dawson Trail Campgrounds on French Lake — pleasant for a day’s picnic and swimming. For longer stays, the information office provides detailed maps of Quetico’s fantastic network of interlocking waterways. You can rent a canoe — no motor launches allowed — and fishing equipment (excellent pike, bass, and trout) in the old mining and logging town of Atikokan.
Ottawa
Like most national capitals created artificially to avoid favoring one established metropolis over another, Ottawa is the perennial butt of carping and jokes. It’s true of Washington, of Brasília, of Canberra, and even more so in Canada where the very idea of a centralized federal government is so hotly contested by its independent-minded provinces. People rarely like government at the best of times, and when it’s the town’s main, almost exclusive “industry,” they have a built-in prejudice against it.
But Ottawa’s second major source of income is nonetheless tourism, because the town is pleasant, offering a pretty setting of parks and waterways for its first-class museums and colorful monuments. The country’s short history is epitomized by a skyline of solid Victorian parliamentary buildings and a bold modern architecture of office blocks and the new National Gallery. And the government machinery remains firmly in touch with its roots when in winter the bureaucrats skate and ski to work along the frozen Rideau Canal.
Accommodatingly situated on the border between Ontario and Québec, Ottawa is a fully bilingual city, though most of the French-speaking community (and the best restaurants) now have their homes in Hull on the Québec side of the Ottawa River.
Except for longer excursions, try to leave the car in the hotel parking lot and walk or take the bus. The complex system of one-way streets designed to avoid rather than to reach key government buildings, and the added confusion of curving rivers and canals, make downtown driving a harrowing business even for locals. One other point: In the absence of any clear logic in street numbering, it’s important when noting an address to be sure you have the nearest cross-streets as well as the number of the building.
Parliament Area
Like the Parliament assemblage in London from which they unashamedly take their architectural inspiration, the Parliament Buildings are an imposing Neo-Gothic pile restored from the ruins left after a devastating fire in 1916 (a current restoration is slated for completion in the year 2000). They dominate the Ottawa River from a bluff somewhat exaggeratedly known as Parliament Hill. As a counterpart to Westminster’s Big Ben, the 98-m (294-ft) Peace Tower, with clocks on all four sides and a 53-bell carillon, was built in front of the Center Block as a monument to World War I. Take the elevator to the observation deck for a fine view of the town from just below the clocks.
Guided tours take in the chambers of the Senate (in place of Britain’s House of Lords) and the House of Commons. If you want to attend a debate, the tourist office (National Arts Centre, 53 Elgin Street at Confederation Square) will advise you on how to get a permit. The handsome pine-paneled Library of Parliament, north of the Centre Block, miraculously survived the 1916 fire. Beneath the formidable Gothic rotunda, you’ll see an imperial, almost goddess-like marble statue of Victoria surrounded by more mortal early Canadian Prime Ministers. Some of the latter’s offices have been restored in the East Block, which also survived the fire in its 1872 state.
Switching its echoes from Westminster to Buckingham Palace, Parliament Hill provides pomp with a Changing of the Guard by 125 soldiers of the Governor General’s Foot Guards (June 23 to August 25, 2001 at 9:45 a.m). On summer evenings, a sound and light show illuminates the Parliament Buildings to present, alternately in English and French, a 30-minute history of Canada.
Sparks Street Mall, the first street in Ottawa to be paved and then the city’s, indeed the country’s, first traffic-free pedestrian zone, is a pleasant shopping area enlivened by street musicians and clowns and bordered by some first-class modern office buildings. Pride of place goes to the elegant 12-story mirror-glass Bank of Canada (between Kent and Bank Streets) by Arthur Erickson. The green patina of the building’s copper skeleton is an artful homage to the copper roofs on the old Parliament Buildings. Inside is the Currency Museum (see page 78). On the vast three-sided Confederation Square — popularly known for its traffic congestion as “Confusion Square” — notice the great granite arch of the National War Memorial, with its statues of 22 World War I soldiers and a horse-drawn cannon. Ironically, it was dedicated by George VI just three months before the outbreak of World War II. The square’s bunker-like National Arts Centre (1969) houses the capital’s ballet, opera, and theater, but it’s the summer beer-garden overlooking the Rideau Canal that is the most popular attraction. Getting a federal government’s priorities in proper perspective, one member of parliament bemoaned the cultural center as “50 years ahead of its time — that’s how long it’ll take the taxpayers to meet the 500 percent cost overrun.” The formidable Château Laurier, (1912) a railway hotel on the north side of the square, is built in the Renaissance castle style much favored by the C.P.R. and C.N.R. for their luxury transcontinental hostelries. Local citizens boast that the Rideau Canal, which stretches 200 km (120 miles) from the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario, qualifies in winter as “the world’s longest skating rink.” In summer, it offers delightful boat cruises and canoeing, or you can explore its banks with a rented bicycle.
On the edge of the parliamentary district, across the Rideau Canal, is Byward Market (one block east of Sussex Drive and north of Rideau Street). Since 1846, when it was a clearing house for nearby farmers, this has been the popular center of town, meeting place for the non-politicos. In its jolly, well-restored state, only one of the market stalls dates as far back as 1867, but the market retains much of its 19th-century atmosphere. Quite apart from the colorful stalls of fruit and vegetables, it’s a great place for breakfast, open even on Sundays in a town that otherwise closes down when the bureaucrats go home.
Sussex Drive
This is the grand parade drive along the Ottawa River to the town’s smartest residential neighborhood, home of ministers and “Embassy Row.” 
The Neo-Gothic Basilica of Notre-Dame (Sussex at Guigues) was born with the capital. The Catholic cathedral’s steeples went up in 1858, though the whole church was not completed until 1890. Québec sculptors Louis Philippe Hébert, Philippe Parizeau, and Flavien Rochon carved the pulpit, choir stalls, organ loft, and bas-reliefs.
Turn off on St. Patrick Street to drive through Nepean Point Park to a statue of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Québec, who looks west along the Ottawa River with his Huron Indian scout. Here he still has the astrolabe that he lost on his explorations. and which gave its name to the nearby Astrolabe Amphitheatre, attractive setting for summer open-air concerts.
Where the road crosses over the Rideau River and Green Island, look for Rideau Falls, pouring its double “curtain” (French rideau) of water into the Ottawa River. The windmill is part of a Renewable Energy Exhibit of methods of gathering solar and wind energy.
For Canadians, 24 Sussex Drive has the same significance as 10 Downing Street for the British. This grey stone house hidden behind the greenery is the Canadian Prime Minister’s residence. His neighborhood, in Rideau Hall just along the road (1 Sussex Drive), is the official residence of the monarchy, the governor general. Except on official occasions, the guards in appropriately British uniforms will usually let you drive or walk in to admire the sweeping stretch of lawns and gardens — look for the governor’s toboggan slide and skating rink.
The drive then circles around the immaculate gardens and fine mansions of Rockcliffe Park. The park’s driveway takes you out to the Rockcliffe Lookout for a spectacular view of the Ottawa River and the mouth of the Gatineau. In the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Barracks, at the north end of St. Laurent Boulevard, you can see some of the horses performing or training for the popular RCMP Musical Ride, the one occasion when the Mounties are still Mounties. 
Museums
In its sparkling new premises on Sussex Drive opposite the Basilica of Notre-Dame, the National Gallery of Canada is the object of an enchanting half-day excursion. Designed by Moshe Safdie, famous for his Habitat homes in Montréal, it houses the country’s best European collections, classical and modern, as well as the choicest works of Canadian artists. The airy glass-and-steel construction brings natural daylight flooding into the spectacular Great Hall and all the galleries. Facing Nepean Point Park is the terrace of the main restaurant, while a more casual lunchroom looks out onto the lovely garden of the neighboring War Museum.
European Collections. Among the most important works from the 14th to the 18th centuries are Simone Martini’s St. Catherine of Alexandria, Cranach’s Venus, Hans Baldung Grien’s Eve, the Serpent and Death, Hans Memling’s Virgin, Christ and St. Anthony, Bronzino’s Portrait of a Man, Annibale Carracci’s Vision of St. Francis, Poussin’s Landscape with a Woman Washing Her Feet, Rubens’ Entombment of Christ, Rembrandt’s Heroine from the Old Testament, and Chardin’s The Governess.
The 19th-century exhibits include works by Turner, Constable, Pissarro, Monet, Dégas, and Cézanne. Klimt and James Ensor provide the transition to the 20th century, well represented by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Francis Bacon.
Contemporary Art. The collections in which American artists come to the fore present works by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, the Pop Art of James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg, the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and Conceptualists such as Solo Lewitt and Joseph Kosuth. The most important of contemporary Canadians here include Guido Molinari, Yves Gaucher, and Michael Snow.
Canadian Collections. Besides some classics of the 19th century evoking the life and landscapes of the early settlement, the best works are from Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven (see page 63). Look for Thomson’s Jack Pine, A. Y. Jackson’s Red Maple, Lawren Harris’s North Shore, Lake Superior, murals by Thomson, Arthur Lismer, and J. E. H. MacDonald, and Emily Carr’s Indian Hut, Queen Charlotte Islands. Inuit Art has some impressive sculpture, prints, and drawings from the 1950s and 1960s. The museum also houses the reconstructed Rideau Convent Chapel, a fine example of French-Canadian 19th-century architecture.
The Photographs Collection covers the history of the art from William Henry Fox Talbot through Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, and August Sander to the contemporary work of Diane Arbus and Paul Diamond.
The august Victoria Memorial Building at Metcalfe and McLeod Streets houses museums created with the treasures uncovered by the Geological Survey of 1841, predating the foundation of Canada itself. The survey went beyond geology and mineralogy to study the uncharted country’s paleontology and anthropology, its climate, forestry, and botany. In the National Museum of Natural Sciences in the east wing, the star attraction is Dinosaur Court, devoted to the 75,000,000-year-old beasts excavated in Alberta. The museum is a good place to look at the country’s rich wildlife as a primer to your own explorations of the Canadian forests and mountains.
The National Museum of Science and Technology (1867 St. Laurent Boulevard) is in the style of science through fun and games. In Canada’s largest museum, there are views of the heavens through a huge refracting telescope, do-it-yourself demonstrations of balance and optics, and a plastic bubble with live chicks hatching in front of your eyes. But with all the new-fangled razzmatazz, the museum hasn’t forgotten the charm of mint-condition antique cars and, above all, old train engines — behemoths from the great era of steam that truly “made” Canada.
In a similar vein, the National Aviation Museum at Rockcliffe Airport traces the history of aviation through the early flying machines, bi- and triplanes, and the great fighters of two world wars. The exhibition includes the Silver Dart, the first plane flown in the British Empire, in 1909. A special place is reserved for the sturdy little bushplanes used to cover the wilderness. In all, about 100 aircraft are displayed in three World War II hangars. Many of the wartime planes take to the skies again on Annual Aeronautical Day, the second Sunday in June. The Canadian War Museum, 330 Sussex Drive, starts with Indian warfare, including the battle prizes of scalps and skulls, and ends with the Normandy D-Day landings in World War II. Field Marshal Göring’s armored Mercedes Benz makes a nice latter-day battle prize. Weapons range from Indian clubs and tomahawks to the longer-range guided missiles of today’s armed forces.
Outside the Currency Museum (Bank of Canada, 245 Sparks Street, between Kent and Lyon) is a three-ton stone “coin” from the Caroline Islands in the Pacific. The smaller stuff is inside, including the Indian currency of beads, wampum (black-and-white shells), and beaver pelts and blankets, as well as the more familiar coinage and paper currency from colonial to modern times.
Gatineau Park
Just a 20-minute drive across the Ottawa River into Québec, and actually the most popular of excursions from the national capital, this 36,000-hectare (89,000-acre) park of lakes and woodland covers an escarpment with dramatic lookouts over the plains of the Ottawa Valley. It’s named after the French hunter Nicolas Gatineau, who first explored it, and its evergreen and deciduous forests are still the home of an abundant wildlife.
Go hiking or biking on well-planned nature trails (details can be obtained from the Old Chelsea Visitors Center). Besides swimming at five public beaches, you can rent canoes and rowboats for fishing on Philippe and La Pêche lakes. Visit Kingsmere, the charming estate where William Lyon Mackenzie King spent his last years. As well as exploring the occult — he spoke to his departed mother through a crystal ball — Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister liked to collect “ruins” on his many world travels. Among others, you’ll find in his gardens pieces of London’s House of Commons, brought back after the Blitz of World War II.
Eastern Ontario
The narrow arm of territory between Ottawa and the St. Lawrence River lies at the historic heart of Upper Canada. This was the home of early Loyalist settlers. Ships were built here to navigate the Great Lakes, and later it became the site for the key section of the St. Lawrence Seaway, linking Montréal to Lake Ontario.
Upper Canada Village
Here, 86 km (53 miles) southeast of Ottawa, the two strands of the region’s history come together in the meticulous recreation of a 19th-century pioneering village, perhaps the best of the country’s many historical showpieces. The homes of the region’s first settlers had to be moved here, east of Morrisburg, when their original location was flooded in the digging of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Start your visit by climbing the small fort tower, from which you get an overall view. In a peaceful, green canalside setting disturbed only by perky Canada geese, notoriously loud honkers, you’ll find authentic pre-1867 buildings, from the simple timbered sawmill or old schoolhouse to the sophisticated brick-built Crysler Hall in the Palladian style favored by colonial land owners from Ontario to Alabama. Crysler was a farmer on whose land an important battle was fought in the War of 1812, marked by a monument beside the village.
Period-costumed artisans demonstrate the crafts of the village: weaving, bread-baking, plowing, and sowing. In the colonial setting of Willard’s Hotel, you can enjoy a home-cooked hot meal or salad lunch.
Kingston
Beautifully located on Lake Ontario at the head of the St. Lawrence River, 180 km (108 miles) southwest of Ottawa, the town gets its charm more from its universities and silvery-grey historic houses than from its federal and provincial prisons. Originally a trading post for the French and native peoples, Kingston became a shipbuilding naval base in the War of 1812. Fort Henry, now spruced up by nicely enacted parades, was built in 1832 as the main military stronghold of Upper Canada. The fort never fired a shot in anger, but you can hear a few rifles and cannons blast off for the Ceremonial Retreat on Wednesday and Saturday evenings in July and August.
For a few years in the 1840s, its location made Kingston capital of pre-Confederation Canada, and the sturdy, pillared City Hall with its lofty dome pays due homage to an illustrious past. Behind, on Market Square, the weekend market attracts the best of Ontario’s fruit and vegetables and the most brazen of the local artists and musicians. 
Thousand Islands
Reached most easily from Kingston, this archipelago of, in fact, 1,700 islands are strung out along the St. Lawrence River for nearly 80 km (48 miles). You can go fishing, sailing, or lie back and enjoy a luxury three-day cruise around the islands aboard the Empress steamboat.
The island scenery is another painter’s delight — the dark green of the spruces and silver birches against grey-and-pink granite outcrops. Millionaires such as songwriter Irving Berlin and cosmetic queen Helena Rubinstein made this their playground with hideaway mansions known as “cottages.” One that escapes that euphemism is Boldt’s Castle, the kind of Gothic folly that magnates liked to dabble in earlier this century. In this case, it was George Boldt, the German owner of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He built it for his wife but she died before it was finished, and it was abandoned as a vast empty fortress, like those that Boldt admired in similar splendid ruin back home in the Rhine Valley.
QUEBEC
If — oh, happy dream — all the old ethnic rivalries could be set aside, most Canadians would acknowledge that Québec is not only the “original” Canada of the first European settlement, but also the province that most comprehensively encompasses within its borders the world’s image of this huge country. To begin with, it is itself huge: It could contain, according to your taste, three Frances or seven Britains. Most of it — two-thirds of the area — is forest. The north is coniferous, serving the province’s important pulp and paper industry, and the south is deciduous, with the maple of the national flag providing delicious syrup, and the ash, oak, and beech that blaze into crimson, amber, and gold in autumn.
There aren’t as many beavers as in the great days of the fur trade, but still enough to fell a few trees around the resort cottages in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montréal. Deer and moose abound for the hunters; farther north there are herds of caribou, and, up towards the Arctic Circle, a few polar bears, too.
Where it’s not forest, city, or the farmland established by the habitants of the St. Lawrence Valley and the Eastern Township Loyalists, it’s water, water everywhere. The mighty St. Lawrence River and Seaway link the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Gigantic dams harness the water’s hydroelectric power north on James Bay, and east on the Manicouagan River. Lakes and streams shimmer with salmon, trout, eel, and pike.
As you travel from bilingual Montréal to New France’s old capital Québec City and the resolutely French-speaking farm villages along the St. Lawrence and around the Gaspé Peninsula, have a thought for local patriotic sensibility. The Québécois can justly claim to be cofounders of the Canadian nation. Abandoned by what many still call the “damned French” (maudits français), they felt that they alone had earned the name of canadiens, and that their British conquerors usurped it. As a tribute to their own past courage, there is both pride and resentment in the Québécois motto “Je me souviens” (“I Remember”). It was they who made the first and hardiest effort to hew a modern living out of this hard land. Like colonials everywhere, their missionaries sometimes brought more religion, their traders more alcohol, and their soldiers more guns than the natives really needed. But the Québécois understood the importance of learning from the native peoples how best to handle the Canadian wilderness. Fur-trading coureurs de bois settled down with Indian wives, and today more than a few Québécois proudly trace their ancestry back to native peoples with a tell-tale birthmark on the hip, high cheekbones, or long sleek black hair.
Outside Montréal, you can’t assume everyone speaks English. Many make it a point of pride not to, until you’ve at least paid them the courtesy of a “Bonjour.” By Québec provincial law, public signs are all in French, and so we will often give you here, beside the English names, the French version as it appears on maps and signposts.
Montréal
This great metropolis, Québec’s largest city with 3.1 million inhabitants, is built on an island at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers. Second in population now to Toronto, it remains a sprawling city of cosmopolitan neighborhoods, each a delight to stroll around but best reached by taxi, bus, or the excellent Métro, where the trains whoosh along on rubber tires. Given the daytime traffic snarls and usual big-city parking problems, use your car only for out-of-town trips.
Mount Royal
For an overall view of the city, start with a bracing walk up the slopes of the charming Mount Royal Park (Parc du Mont-Royal). Follow the footpath and stairs from the end of Peel Street or a shorter route from the Chemin Remembrance car park. Perhaps the most pleasant way is to take a leisurely ride in a horse-drawn carriage from Dominion Square.
Known with characteristic local irony as la Montagne (the Mountain), the heights were spotted by Jacques Cartier on his historic journey up the St. Lawrence River in 1535, and named Mont Réal in homage to his king François I.
From the massive timber and stone Chalet de la Montagne or the steel cross at the summit (illuminated at night), you can look out over the river flowing from the Lac des Deux Montagnes past the city on its northeasterly journey to the Atlantic. Montréalers conveniently twist the compass by considering the St. Lawrence as “south” of the city; the roads parallel to the river are divided into “east” and “west” sectors by the Boulevard St-Laurent. Down by the port are the low stone buildings of Old Montréal (Vieux Montréal). The concrete, steel, and glass towers of the modern city cluster around Boulevard René Lévesque, which runs parallel to the river. At the far end, Jacques-Cartier Bridge links Montréal Island to the Expo ’67 site on St. Helen’s Island (Ile Ste-Hélène) and over to the “southern” shore. Victoria Bridge spans the St. Lawrence to the south.
Southwest of Mount Royal, on the slopes of the smaller hill of Westmount, are the grand villas and mansions of Montréal’s old Anglo-Canadian élite. North and west of the park are many of the city’s ethnic neighborhoods and the chic French-speaking township of Outremont. On the clearest days, you may spot the Laurentian Mountains to the northeast and the Green Mountains across the U.S. border in Vermont.
Landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York’s Central Park, Mount Royal is a popular refuge from the city bustle, the place for picnics in the summer and tobogganing and skiing in the winter, with the little Beaver Lake (Lac des Castors) for sailing model boats (or skating). A stroll around the lake is the perfect way to capture a sense of the town’s ethnic diversity. On the park benches, you may hear gossip not only in French and English, but Italian, Greek, Yiddish, and Russian.
Old Montréal
Between rue St-Antoine and the port and flanked by rue McGill and rue Berri, this is the site of Maisonneuve’s original settlement of Ville-Marie (Métro Champ-de-Mars). All but a few stones of the 18th-century city ramparts have gone, but many historic houses have been restored to evoke some of the flavor of New France.
The colorful, tree-lined Place Jacques-Cartier makes a good point from which to start a walking tour (or a riding tour in a horse-drawn calèche available here for hire). An itinerary can be mapped out over coffee at one of the many pleasant sidewalk cafés. Once a fruit and vegetable market, the cobblestone square remains a favorite venue for flower-vendors and itinerant artists. The old stone buildings were designed to beat the harsh winters with distintive, tall, steep-sloping roofs to keep the weighty snow and ice from accumulating.
Across the rue Notre-Dame, the 19th-century Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) is built in the imposing style of the French Renaissance. It was from the balcony beneath the clock in 1967 that General de Gaulle delivered his incendiary cry of “Vive le Québec libre!,” warming the hearts of local separatists. The general was not intimidated by the statue of Lord Horatio Nelson watching him from the top of Place Jacques-Cartier. Montréal’s oldest monument was somewhat provocatively erected in 1809, just four years after the British admiral’s devastating defeat of the French at Trafalgar.
Diagonally opposite the Hôtel de Ville on rue Notre-Dame, the Château Ramezay was home of the French governor Claude de Ramezay from 1705 to 1724. It passed successively into the hands of the French West Indies Trading Company (to store its spices), the British, and, during their brief occupation of the city in 1775, the American generals Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold. Benjamin Franklin stayed here during his fruitless attempt to win Québec over to the American cause. After years of neglect, the château has been restored and transformed into a museum showing a more comfortable side of frontier life in New France: elegant 18th-century furnishings, a grand colonial kitchen in the basement, and the nice added touch of magnificent carved mahogany paneling imported from the old trading company’s French offices. Iroquois clothes and artifacts give a hint of life outside the stockade.
The rue Bonsecours is one of the principal historic residential streets leading from rue Notre-Dame towards the Vieux Port (Old Port). The Maison Papineau (Number 440), distinguished by its double row of gabled garrets in the roof, dates back to 1785. It is the family home of the controversial 19th-century politician Louis-Joseph Papineau, leader of the militant patriotes but also cautious protector of his seigneurial property (see page 19). In 1837, the house nearly burned down in a violent riot, and British soldiers had to come to Papineau’s rescue. He fled to the countryside and did not take part in the subsequent insurrection.
On the corner of rue St-Paul, the older Maison du Calvet was built in 1725 by a prominent Huguenot merchant. As a Protestant, Pierre du Calvet was appointed by the British justice of the peace but then ended up in jail himself for selling supplies and information to the American invaders. With its broad chimney, fine-grained limestone frames around the doors, and gracefully tapered casement windows, the house is one of the more handsome architectural specimens of the French colonial era. The sturdy interior of wide, rough-hewn floorboards and massive pinewood roofbeams is fitted out from the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts with antique Québec furniture, rugs, lanterns, clocks, and porcelain appropriate to the life of a wealthy 18th-century businessman. A framed copy of the bilingual Québec Gazette, dating from 1786, suggests that colonials of the New World had an uncommon interest in the more arcane news of international events in the Old World, such as Turkey’s troubles with Venice or the quarrels of the Dutch royal family.
Since 1772, the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours, 400 rue Saint-Paul Est, has stood on the site of a chapel that was built for the colony’s first schoolteacher, Marguerite Bourgeois, but destroyed by fire. She and three young woman companions brought a civilizing influence to the harshness of the beleaguered settlement. Acting as both teachers and nurses, they also took charge of marriageable girls known as the filles du Roi, the “King’s daughters.” The filles du Roi were in fact daughters of peasants and poor artisans, shipped over from France as wives for bachelor farmers and fur traders. In the 19th century, Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours became the “Sailors’ Chapel,” to which survivors of shipwrecks brought model ships they had carved as offerings of thanksgiving. The models still hang from the ceiling, lit up now by tiny electric bulbs. Notice how the trompe l’oeil painting on the low arched ceiling aspires to turn the little church into a lofty Gothic cathedral. Climb the church tower for a good view of Vieux Montréal and the harbor.
Most of the ugly old warehouses have been demolished along the Vieux Port at the foot of Place Jacques-Cartier. Some have been refurbished as cafés or hotels; one pier now houses the headquarters for the Cirque du Soleil, another an IMAX theater. Take a walk along the port to Pointe à Callières, where the Ville-Marie settlers first landed. An obelisk on the nearby Place Royale commemorates their adventure. The statue at the Pointe is of an Anglo-Canadian, John Young, who developed the port’s commerce in the 19th century.
The rue St-Sulpice takes you over the Place d’Armes, close to the site of the first French battles with the Iroquois. Today it serves as a visual link between the historic old town of the pioneers and the new city of commerce and industry. In the middle is a statue of Maisonneuve, looking very like one of Alexandre Dumas’ musketeers. He’s brandishing the royal French fleur-de-lys flag that inspired the Québec provincial flag of today. The 19th-century Neo-Gothic Notre-Dame Basilica was designed by James O’Donell, an Irish Protestant New Yorker so inspired by his assignment that he converted to Catholicism. It once took 12 men to ring the great bell in the west tower, a task now accomplished with electricity. The garishly opulent interior was the work of a Québécois, Victor Bourgeau. Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Chapel, behind the main altar, unites modern and traditional religious art in a more intimate setting for marriages and memorial services. A little museum displays church sculpture and painting, notably some almost surreal works by Pierre-Adolphe-Arthur Guindon, a Sulpician monk. Next to the church is the Seminary of St-Sulpice, Montréal’s oldest surviving edifice, built in 1685 to lead the missionary work among the Iroquois. It also boasts North America’s oldest public clock (1710).
The Place d’Armes is enclosed on three sides by modern buildings, including the huge Post Office tower, while opposite Notre-Dame stands the venerable Bank of Montréal (1847). The black marble and brass of its monumental entrance hall impose a pious appreciation of Canada’s oldest banking institution. The statue of Patria is dedicated to the fallen of World War I. Take a peek, too, around the grand Exchange Room, awe-inspiring relic of the days when Canadian money was in the hands of august gentlemen, before they handed it over to those slick young Golden Boys of Toronto. A little banking museum shows the way it used to be, complete with a teller’s window in the style of the bank’s foundation in 1817.
Back down by the river, Place d’Youville, named after a lady who established here the charitable order of the Grey Nuns, offers a quieter, more romantic end to your tour of Vieux Montréal. The Youville Stables (Ecuries d’Youville) are an enchanting collection of early 19th-century grey-stone gabled buildings now containing restaurants and offices looking out onto a peaceful garden. The U-shaped courtyard makes a lovely setting for open-air plays and recitals in the summer. The “stables” were in fact nothing more romantic than a warehouse, but they did for a time serve as a garage for horse-carriages. Next to the stables is an old red-brick fire station transformed into the Montréal History Center (Centre d’histoire de Montréal), presenting an audiovisual documentary history of the city.
Downtown
The nucleus of downtown Montréal is located between Boulevard René Lévesque and Sherbrooke Street running parallel to the river, bounded by Guy and St-Denis Streets. It is best characterized by its bold new office skyscrapers, cultural complexes, and shopping centers, crowding in on a die-hard bunch of old churches, museums, and all-night delicatessens.
Start at Square Dorchester, where the horse-drawn calèches wait (they are also rather nicely known as hippomobiles). Artists and flower vendors sell their wares around Henry Moore’s sculpture Reclining Nude and more austere statues of Scottish poet Robert Burns and Canadian Prime Ministers Wilfrid Laurier and John MacDonald. The Sun Life skyscraper, built in 1933, is the city’s oldest. There’s a summer city tourist information kiosk on the south side of the square and a year-round office north of the square at 1010 rue Ste-Catherine Ouest.
Northeast along Boulevard René Lévesque is the Roman-Catholic cathedral of Montréal, something of a visual oddity, at least for European visitors. The cathedral of Marie-Reine-du-Monde (Mary, Queen of the World) is a 19th-century half-size replica of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Half-size but still massive enough — inside, the nave is 109 m (328 ft) long, the transept is 73 m (220 ft) long, and the vault of the dome is 83 m (250 ft) high. Beneath that dome, over the high altar, is another replica of St. Peter’s: Bernini’s celebrated gilded bronze canopy. Unfortunately, there is nothing to match Bernini’s great square to give you a proper perspective, and the church is dwarfed by the huge Queen Elizabeth Hotel and the Sun Life skyscraper.
The new gigantism continues with Place Ville-Marie (1962), dominated by the other side of the Queen Elizabeth, Canadian National Railway’s Central Station, and the soaring Royal Bank building, an intersecting cross-shaped tower designed by I.M. Pei. The Québec provincial tourist information office is at the northern corner of the square, near the intersection of Peel and St. Catherine Street West.
But Place Ville-Marie is, above all, the starting point of Montréal’s vast underground city, which acts as an ecological punchline to the joke of a Québec winter. In self-defense against five or six months of ice, snow, and slush, 500,000 pedestrians frequent a complete alternative city of shops, cinemas, nightclubs, restaurants, and cafés. Hotel residents can spend a whole night out on the town in the winter months without overcoat or galoshes. And it’s almost as popular on a sweltering day in July. Some 30 km (15 miles) of subterranean galleries (linked by Métro) stretch across the city, taking in Place Ville-Marie and Place Bonaventure, Les Terrasses, Place des Arts, and Complexe Desjardins, and even passing under the St. Lawrence River to the suburb of Longueuil on the south shore.
Above ground, rue Ste-Catherine is the city’s main shopping thoroughfare — department stores, cinemas, travel agencies, delicatessens, and bars — more popular than chic, but always lively. At the corner of University Street the Anglican cathedral of Christ Church (1859) is a classic piece of elegant English Gothic — take a look inside at the fine stone sculpture on the high altar.
Crescent Street, with neighboring Mountain (Montagne) and Bishop Streets, is one of Montréal’s more fashionable boutique and bistro areas. The Victorian stone row houses have escaped demolition and have been lovingly refurbished and brightly painted for conversion into off-beat shops, art galleries, and bars for the singles crowd.
These rejuveniated buildings make an appropriate transition from Ste-Catherine to the elegance of Sherbrooke Street. With the Museum of Fine Arts (see page 105) near the intersection of Crescent Street, Sherbrooke is the town’s main “gallery row,” where high-priced antiques, jewelry, silverware, and Oriental carpet shops mingle. 
Even if you’re not staying here, the ritzy Ritz-Carlton Hotel makes a fine rendezvous for a restful or bracing cocktail in mid-sightseeing. Opposite the McCord Museum of local history (see page 106), McGill University is Montréal’s internationally renowned English-speaking university.
Founded in the early 19th century by a Scottish fur trader, James McGill, and especially respected for its engineering and medicine faculties, it has a student enrollment of 15,000. In 1969, Québécois separatists staged violent but unsuccessful demonstrations to have it transformed into a French-speaking institution. (The city’s other English-speaking college is Concordia while the Université de Montréal and the Université du Québec à Montréal are both French-speaking).
Between Maisonneuve and R. Lévesque boulevards, art and commerce come together at the Place des Arts and Complexe Desjardins. The modern cultural center is comprised of a concert hall, two theaters, and a recital room for chamber music. At the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 175 rue Ste-Catherine Ouest, home of the Montréal Symphony Orchestra, the elegant tone of the whole complex is set in the foyer decorated with Aubusson tapestries and sculptures in bronze, mahogany, aluminum, and ceramics. Notice above the concert hall doors the soapstone carvings of the Inuit sculptor Yununkpuk.
Across rue Ste-Catherine, you pass through the imposing glass portals of the attractive multilevel shopping center of Complexe Desjardins, opened in 1976 during the grand building spree of the Montréal Olympic Games. 
Montréal’s Neighborhoods
From a local point of view, Vieux Montréal is a tourist attraction for the landmarks of the city’s historical beginnings, while downtown is for business and special nights out. But the real color and spice of the people’s everyday life is to be found in their neighborhoods.
And you’ll find in the architecture the missing links between the French-inspired homes of Vieux Montréal and the international anonymity of the city center’s 20th-century skyscrapers. While the bourgeoisie’s red-brick or stone houses are clearly inspired by Georgian and Victorian London and grander residences by the country houses and châteaux of continental Europe, the working-class row houses with outside iron staircases leading to upper floors (thus saving space inside) are a more characteristic Montréal feature.
Almost a neighborhood all to itself, Boulevard St-Laurent used to mark the “border” between the Anglo-Canadians to the west and the French-Canadians to the east. Anglos call it “the Main” and French-Canadians make a nice — and rare — compromise with “la Main.” The neighborhood lines have blurred in recent years, but the Main stays appropriately neutral, a veritable United Nations of Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Polish, Jewish, Arab, and Japanese specialty shops, grocery stores, delicatessens, and cafés. Gourmets make a special pilgrimage down a little side-street to Waldman’s fish market.
French-speaking students from the Université du Québec à Montréal meet in cafés, bistros, and bookshops along rue St-Denis. Here and around the tree-shaded Square St-Louis, nicely restored or equally nicely battered Victorian gingerbread mansions and iron-staircased row houses fight a picturesque rear-guard action against the encroachment of the modern red-brick blocks of the university. At the West End of the square, rue Prince-Arthur has been transformed into a pleasant tile-paved pedestrian mall of boutiques and restaurants. The street is also one of the town’s livelier night-time hangouts for jazz and folk music.
Boulevard St-Laurent below Lévesque, squeezed out by the urban redevelopment around the Complexe Guy-Favreau and Palais des Congrès, the compact little Chinatown huddles into a six-block area around rue de la Gauchetière. Some of its residents are descendants of the valiant laborers who helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Seek out Montréal’s Little Italy north of Mount Royal around the Jean-Talon Market on the Place du Marché du Nord (Métro Jean-Talon). The best trattorias in town are here, blessedly not the most expensive. The raucous market gives a distinctively Italian flavor to the fruit and vegetables of the Québec countryside. The Greeks, some 50,000 strong, have mostly chosen the area around the Avenue du Parc, east of Outremont, for their cafés and tavernas. 
With second- and third-generation prosperity, most of the Jews have moved on from the rue St-Urbain neighborhood made famous by the writings of Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) to make way gradually for an equally colorful Portuguese community. A nearby monument of Jewish folklore that no amount of urban upheavals can seem to budge is the ever-crowded Schwartz’s Delicatessen (officially called Montréal Hebrew Delicatessen) located at 3895 Boulevard St-Laurent. Assimilating more easily with the Anglo community — only Protestant schools accepted their children — Eastern European Jews have “graduated” to wealthy Westmount or emigrated, again, to Toronto. French-speaking Jews, more recent arrivals from North Africa, have settled in middle-class Outremont.
On the north side of Mount Royal, beyond the Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine, the handsome villas of Outremont make up the favored neighborhood of the French-Canadian bourgeoisie, in fact an independent township situated within Montréal’s city borders. Originally an Anglo stronghold, part of it is still known even among French speakers as Upper-Outremont, family home of that splendidly ambiguous French-Canadian, prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The “lower” part of this independent township has a breezy street-life, especially among the sidewalk cafés on rue Bernard.
And where have all the Anglos gone? Many of the upper-middle-class variety are holding out in Westmount. This bastion of the old Montréal élite of British origin became a prime target for the more violent members of the separatist Front de libération du Québec, who in the 1960s set off bombs in Westmount’s mailboxes. Those not put off by this can still be seen in tweeds and cavalry twill, walking their dogs around Summit Park, where the Belvedere affords a fine view of the city. Head for the tree-lined Summit Road, Summit Crescent, and Summit Circle and you’ll spot their ivy-covered mansions and grey-stone turreted châteaux half-concealed behind trees and shrubbery at the top of a grassy slope. The architecture here is a wonderful compendium of French Romanesque, German Gothic, and Italian Renaissance. Westmount Square gives you a sharp but not inelegant jolt back into the 20th century, with the black steel and glass office buildings of Mies van der Rohe.
Dominating the skyline beyond Westmount on the Côte-des-Neiges, St. Joseph’s Oratory (Oratoire St-Joseph) receives up to 2 million Catholic pilgrims each year. The huge sanctuary, which holds 13,000 worshippers, commemorates the healing powers of Brother André. Born Alfred Bessette in 1845, one of a poor Québécois family of 12 children, Brother André was gatekeeper at the monastic Congregation of the Holy Cross. He administered to the sick in a small wooden chapel that he himself erected; it is still standing near the transept of the present oratory. Over a million faithful attended his funeral in 1937. His tomb is in the crypt. The best time to enjoy the bright and airy simplicity of the oratory’s modern interior is at the Sunday afternoon organ recitals.
Olympic Park
Situated east of downtown opposite Maisonneuve Park (Métro Pie-IX), the impressive complex of sports facilities built specifically for the 1976 Olympic Games is an eloquent monument to the visions of grandeur that characterized Mayor Jean Drapeau. After the sweeping (some would say devastating) downtown redevelopment and the ambitious construction on the St. Lawrence River for Expo ’67, the Olympic Park was to be the apotheosis of his “new Montréal.” As you can see on one of the daily guided tours through Olympic Park, the result is as grandiose in design as it has been ruinous in cost, to the continuing chagrin of local taxpayers with long memories and short bank balances. Centerpiece is the mammoth Olympic Stadium, seating 70,000 spectators for the home games of the Montréal Expos baseball team and rock‘n’roll concerts. 
One of the most popular facilities is the Vélodrome, with a redwood track for cycling and roller-skating around a central arena for boxing, wrestling, and basketball, with ice-skating in winter. (Montréal’s legendary ice hockey team, the Canadiens, plays at the other end of town at the Molson Centre, a new arena near Place Bonaventure.) Beside the Olympic Park across Sherbrooke Street are the city’s Botanical Gardens at 4101 Sherbrooke East. This delightful oasis of greenery boasts some 26,000 species of plants and trees from all over the world, lovingly tended to resist the rigors of the Québec climate. A miniature railway takes you around the gardens. Among the highlights are magnificent orchids and cacti in the greenhouses and an exquisite arboretum of Japanese bonsai. 
St. Lawrence River
After years of hiding the river behind a bleak expanse of warehouses, factories, and railway tracks, Montréal has opened up its waterfront, more recently with the music festivals and flea market of the Vieux Port, but largely at the earlier instigation of that much maligned Mayor Drapeau.
Expo ’67 provided the major breakthrough with the choice of the river’s Ile Ste-Hélène as the principal site for the international pavilions. The former U.S. pavilion has been converted into the Biosphere, an ecology-oriented museum. Two other buildings house a new casino. The fun and adventure of the World’s Fair are perpetuated with outdoor concerts, exhibits, and films on ecology, urban life, Canadian history, and the technology of the future.
In the middle of the island, close to where the French army burned its flags in Montréal’s military capitulation to the British in 1760, the D.M. Stewart Museum is a restoration of the fort commissioned by the Duke of Wellington 60 years later. The military drills and parades staged here in the summer by uniformed students pay appropriate homage to both French and British (more precisely, the Scots Highlander) tradition. The fort’s Military and Maritime Museum displays ship models, maps, navigational instruments, and Canada’s weapons and uniforms from the 17th century to World War II. Beyond Jacques Cartier Bridge, La Ronde amusement park plays every imaginable ultramodern variation on the swings and roundabouts of a country fair. Put the kids on the Gyrotron whirligig or Aquapark waterslide and watch (or forget about them) from the beer garden. The closest Montréal can take you to the tropics is among its exotic fish in the Aquarium on the other side of Dolphin Lake (Lac des Dauphins) from the waterslide park.
A bridge (leading from the Ste-Hélène Métro station) crosses over to the Ile Notre-Dame. This artificial island built from landfill dredged for canal construction has been embellished by Les Floralies flower park in the center of a circuit for Grand Prix motor racing. On the island’s southern tip, beyond the Victoria Bridge, you can climb an observation tower for a view of the highly impressive St. Lambert Lock, a key point on the great St. Lawrence Seaway.
From the Cité du Havre north of Victoria Bridge, the controversial apartment complex of Habitat, designed by the Israeli-born architect Moshe Safdie for Expo ’67, provides residents with a grandstand view of the river and its islands. What looks to some like the aftermath of a child’s tantrum among its building blocks is on closer inspection an artful composition of 354 precast concrete boxes (originally hoisted into place by crane) to create 158 homes of various sizes and combinations. To see the river from the river, take a harbor cruise from Quai Victoria, the northern most wharf in Vieux Montréal, at the foot of rue Berri. 
For the more sporting breed, rafting expeditions also start out from Quai Victoria to shoot the famous Lachine Rapids. You can also rent a bicycle for a pleasant ride along the Lachine Canal, dug in 1825 and deepened for the seaway in 1959. In winter, it makes a great skating rink.
Museums
Among the most important of Montréal’s many museums is its Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des Beaux Arts), 1380 Sherbrooke Street West. It has an honorable collection of European artists, including El Greco, Rubens, Hans Memling, Cranach, and Poussin, and the British 18th-century masters Reynolds, Gainsborough, Raeburn, Romney, and Hogarth. The moderns include Picasso and Giacometti.
But it’s worth devoting most of your time here to the excellent Canadian galleries. In the 19th-century section, look for the imposing, if rather severe, classical portraits of Antoine-Sébastien Plamondon (1802–1895) and the markedly gentler works of his Québécois student and rival Théophile Hamel (1817–1870).
Mah-Min or The Feather is a dramatic study of an Assiniboine Indian chief in Manitoba by Paul Kane (1810–1871). This Torontonian born in County Cork, Ireland, traveled all over the continent to gather a visual record, at times somewhat romanticized, of Canada’s native peoples. His contemporary, Amsterdam-born Cornelius Krieghoff (1815–1872), concentrated on the Québec peasantry and landscapes, as you can see here with his striking Montmorency Falls in Winter.
The dazzling Village Street, West Indies, by Montréal’s James Wilson Morrice (1865–1924), is a fine work by this most celebrated of Canada’s expatriate painters. A friend of Matisse, he worked principally in Europe and North Africa.
Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, and Emily Carr all have major works here. But of the moderns, the most significant represented is Paul-Emile Borduas (1905–1960). His Les signes s’envolent and L’étoile noire are stark, disturbing abstracts by a man who began his career as a painter of church murals and stained glass. Rebelling against conservative religion under the dual influences of surrealism and psychoanalysis, Borduas led the school of Québec Automatistes, represented here with outstanding works by Jean-Paul Riopelle, born in 1923.
The Museum of Contemporary Art (Musée d’Art Contemporain), 185 rue Ste-Catherine, houses a stunning collection of works by Canadian and international artists. The small but tastefully designed McCord Museum (690 Sherbrooke Street West) provides some fascinating insights into Canadian life — Inuit and Indian as well as the world of the fur trader and other pioneers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Dominated by a totem pole from British Columbia, the exhibits include costumes, artifacts, paintings, drawings, and magnificent old photographs from the William Notman archives (said to contain 45,000 prints and negatives).
The Museum of Decorative Arts (Musée des arts décoratifs) is housed in the 20th-century Château Dufresne (corner of Sherbrooke and Boulevard Pie-IX at 2200 rue Crescent). More palazzo than château, with its frescoes and reinforced concrete columns clad in Italian marble, the museum is devoted principally to international modern design in ceramics, glass, and textiles from 1940 to the present day.
Train enthusiasts should head out to the Canadian Railway Museum in the southern suburb of St-Constant, 122A rue St-Pierre. Ride an old tram to the country station where the sheds display historic train engines of the Canadian Pacific and the luxury private coach of William Van Horne, the man who master-minded the building of C.P.R.’s transcontinental railway. On Sundays, you can take a ride in one of the old steam trains.
Eastern Townships
Stretching to the border with the U.S. states of Vermont and New Hampshire, this pleasant region of farmland and orchards was settled at the end of the 18th century by Loyalist refugees from the American Revolution. There’s a distinctly New England flavor to the architecture of white clapboard houses in a landscape of rolling hills, green meadows, and lakes, but the population is today overwhelmingly French-speaking. Tourist offices have tried to rename the area L’Estrie, but even the most militant Québécois prefer the customary direct, if approximate, translation of the English: Cantons de l’Est.
East on Motorway 10, a tour of the region makes an easy day trip out of Montréal, but you may well choose to stay longer for a restful boat cruise, picnic, or ramble, taking advantage of the many delightful old-fashioned country inns and restaurants using the excellent local farm produce.
Popular with the sailing and windsurfing fraternity, Lake Brome and the sleepy town of Knowlton make a pleasant first stop. To see what the farmers are up to, head over on Saturday mornings to the market in Sutton. Take a leisurely boat cruise on Lake Memphremagog (“Beautiful Waters”), the region’s largest, stretching across the border into Vermont. At St-Benoît-du-Lac, look for the graceful Neo-Gothic grey-stone silhouette of the Benedictine abbey, much appreciated for the monks’ Gregorian chant. The monks also make and sell some fine cheeses — an Italian-style ricotta, blue Ermite, and the Mont St-Benoît, great with the apples they grow in their orchard.
Farther east, you’ll find the most characteristic New England atmosphere around Lake Massawippi, particularly in North Hatley, where 19th-century colonial mansions have been converted into elegant inns. The town has some good antiques shops. In summer, The Piggery provides a home for one of the region’s last surviving English-language theaters. Thanks to its situation in a sheltered valley, North Hatley enjoys a particularly pleasant microclimate that attracts hummingbirds and flora indicative of more southern climes.
At Coaticook, hikers and picnickers head for the wooded ravines along the Coaticook River. In August, the town stages a milk festival with the cows (and some of the milkmaids) dressed in fancy summer bonnets. The great attraction at Cookshire is the June bread festival.
The Laurentians
The densely forested, rolling mountain range that the Québécois call les Laurentides constitutes a favorite summer and winter playground for the people of Montréal. Swimming, sailing, canoeing, waterskiing, fishing, hiking, horseback-riding, golf — the list of summer pleasures is endless. In winter, the skating and skiing, downhill and cross-country, are the best in eastern Canada. And the landscape is a pure joy, with long, narrow glacial lakes fed by cold streams gurgling down the granite mountain slopes of yellow birch, beech, sugar maple, and fir.
The virgin forests were long a refuge for Algonquin Indians fleeing the Iroquois. The Québécois began to settle here in any great numbers only in the second half of the 19th century, when an enterprising curate, Antoine Labelle of St-Jérôme, promoted it as an alternative for peasants who were otherwise immigrating to New England. This southeastern edge of the great Canadian Shield proved poor farm country and difficult to exploit for logging, but it really came into its own in the 20th century with the development of tourism. In addition to local Montréalers, it attracts steady traffic from New England.
The heart of the resort area is within an easy 90-minute to 2-hour drive from the city for a weekend or longer stay. Motorway 15 northwest from Montréal, then Highway 117 take you into forested foothills immediately beyond the metropolis.
Just 70 km (42 miles) from the city, St-Sauveur-des-Monts makes a charming spot to stop for lunch on one of the roadside flowered terraces. In winter, the resort is popular for its floodlit nightskiing. Ste-Adèle on the shores of Lac Rond is a favorite with painters and their groupies. The town’s Village de Séraphin recaptures the atmosphere of life in the Laurentians in the 1880s.
Probably the liveliest resort in the area is Ste-Agathe-des-Monts. It boasts plenty of good restaurants and folksong bars (boîtes à chansons), and a famous summer theater, Le Patriote. Night owls overcome their hangover with a stroll or boat cruise around the Lac des Sables. 
The full natural beauty of the Laurentians is best appreciated in Mont-Tremblant Provincial Park. Rent a canoe or kayak to explore some of the 500 lakes and rivers that sparkle across an area of 1,500 sq. km (579 square miles). It was the rush of those streams that inspired the Algonquin name Manitonga Sontana, Mountain of the Trembling Spirit, emitting its muffled boom when man disturbed its peace. Mont-Tremblant’s 1,058-m (3,175-ft) Johannsen peak is the highest in the Laurentians. At the St-Donat reception center or other entry points to the park, you’ll find detailed maps of self-guiding nature trails with signposts describing the forest’s flora and fauna. The park also provides forest guides for group tours. The park’s wildlife, even more abundant in the Rouge-Matawin Nature Reserve to the north, includes moose, deer, black bear, otter, mink, muskrat, fox, and beaver. Birdwatchers may spot grouse, loon, heron, finches, and warblers, while anglers can hope to catch speckled and lake trout, pike, bass, and walleye.
Québec City
Whereas Montréal has become increasingly “Americanized,” the provincial capital remains unmistakably, even defiantly Québécois, if not downright “French.” It’s difficult to miss, in this proud cradle of New France, that the town is borrowing a leaf from the book of the modern French republic by calling its provincial parliament the Assemblée Nationale. Only one percent of the population of 664,000 do not speak French. 
The historic center of the city has something of the atmosphere of France’s Atlantic port towns in the neighborhood down by the St. Lawrence River, while the streets and squares up on the promontory offer North Americans a first hint of Paris’s Latin Quarter or even Montmartre. Certainly it’s a town for that most Parisian of creatures, the flâneur, or stroller, wandering at leisure through narrow back streets, paying due homage to the monuments of Québec City’s past triumphs and tribulations, but even more alert to the colors and smells of the living present.
Québec is said to be derived from an Algonquin word meaning “where the river narrows,” and this becomes most apparent when you see the city’s great outcrop of rock, jutting out over the St. Lawrence. It was named Cap Diamant, after the shiny stones that Jacques Cartier mistook for diamonds (see page 14). Thus, the city dominated river traffic and prospered from a flourishing trade in fur, lumber, shipbuilding, tanneries, furniture, and textiles. Modern shipping and the advent of the railways crippled its port activities, and the city now lives from the service industries of tourism and provincial government administration.
For the best view of the city’s spectacular location, cross over to the St. Lawrence River’s south bank and take the ferry (traversier) from the suburb of Lévis. Otherwise head through the airy but unexceptional modern city to the historic center of Old Québec, where the fortified Upper and Lower Town stand at the top and bottom of Cap Diamant, linked by a steep road and funicular railway. Apart from the Citadel and Battlefields Park, every sight worth seeing is within easy walking distance, though you may like to try a 45-minute ride in a horse-drawn calèche (from the Parc de l’Esplanade).
Upper Town
Start on top of the rock, where the city’s principal landmark is a hotel, the Château Frontenac, looming over the town since 1892 like the protective fortress it no longer needs. Because of its dramatic location and the fairytale turrets of its Gothic-Renaissance architecture, the Frontenac is one of the most charmingly bombastic of all the many grand hotels that the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railways put up across the country as symbols of their commercial power. It is named after Count Louis de Frontenac, a rascally 17th-century French governor who upset the clergy by encouraging the sale of brandy to the native peoples. Take a look inside at the stucco carvings, tapestries, and handsome wood paneling.
Behind the hotel, beyond an 1898 statue of Samuel de Champlain, the city’s founder, Dufferin Terrace offers a magnificent view over the St. Lawrence and downriver to the Ile d’Orléans. Stroll alongside a pleasant little garden, Parc des Gouverneurs, with its obelisk paying tribute to Generals Wolfe and Montcalm, both killed at the great battle for Québec in 1759. The terrace is prolonged by the Promenade des Gouverneurs, continuing the walk along the foot of the citadel towards Battlefields Park.
North of the Frontenac, Place d’Armes is the center of Old Québec, where troops were mustered and paraded, proclamations read out, criminals whipped or executed. In the middle, the Monument of Faith (Monument de la Foi) commemorates the work of French Catholic missionaries in North America. On the north side of the square, the Musée du Fort, 10 rue Ste-Anne, stages a sound and light show alternately in English and French on the military history of Québec City.
Artists gather in the narrow rue du Trésor at the northwest corner of the Place d’Armes to display their works or paint your portrait. The street leads into the city’s “Latin Quarter,” with a quite Parisian air to the 18th-century houses, cafés, and bookshops around rue Couillard, rue St-Flavien, and rue Hébert.
The neighborhood’s “Latin” derives from the scholarship of a Seminary, rue de l’Université, founded in 1663 by the first bishop of Québec, François de Montmorency Laval. In the summer, open-air concerts are held in the courtyard. In the Musée du Séminaire, 9 rue de l’Universite, you’ll find a portrait of the crusty old bishop painted in 1672 by Brother Luc, as well as landscapes by Joseph Légaré and self-portraits by Antoine Plamondon and Théophile Hamel.
Set back behind tall trees off the rue des Jardins, the Anglican Holy Trinity Cathedral of 1804, with its elegant spire, will be familiar to Londoners for its respectful imitation of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Notice inside the solid old pews of English oak.
In an attractive garden setting, the large Ursuline Convent was established in 1639 and rebuilt twice after fire. Its chapel has a fine 18th-century altar painting and pulpit. Montcalm was buried here after the battle, but only his skull remains, in a museum otherwise devoted to the convent’s first mother superior, who compiled the first dictionary of the Iroquois and Algonquin languages. The pasture for the convent’s cattle is now the quiet, spacious Parc de l’Esplanade, the perfect place to rest your tired sightseeing feet.
Lower Town
Various stairways and the winding Côte de la Montagne take you down past Montmorency Park to the site of Champlain’s original colony, which grew into the Ville Basse (Lower Town). One of the more hazardous ways down, and so a favorite with children, is the Escalier Casse-Cou (Breakneck Stairway), merely dangerous when wet, lethal when icy. For the view, take the funicular railway from Dufferin Terrace. The funicular’s Lower Town terminal was once the house of Louis Joliet, great 17th-century fur trader and explorer of the Mississippi River.
Champlain’s Abitation of 1608 — two wooden houses and a storehouse for furs surrounded by a stockade and a ditch — stood on the Place Royale, now a beautifully restored square of elegant 17th- and 18th-century houses. In the center is a replica of a 1686 bust of Louis XIV. Facing the Place Royale, the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires celebrates French victories over the British before 1759.
After centuries of devastation by war, fire, plunder, and sheer neglect, the meticulous restoration work by the Québec provincial government has been a major act of faith in the cultural legacy of New France, reinforcing the provincial motto “Je me souviens.” After 1759, most colonial administrators and merchants just abandoned Québec, while many who stayed on moved to the shelter of the new British defenses in the Upper Town. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, older buildings were often arbitrarily razed to make way for waterfront warehouses and workshops.
Among the historic houses on rue du Marché-Champlain, Maison Chevalier (1752) has become a museum of old Québécois furniture and domestic utensils. The Maison Dumont (1689) on Place Royale is now the Maison des Vins, selling good French wine and owned, like all Québécois wine and alcohol retailers, by the provincial government. On the corner of the ruelle du Porche, Maison Milot (1691) is notable for its sturdy roof beams.
The quaintest of the city’s antiques shops have clustered around rue Sault-au-Matelot and rue St-Paul down by the port. The bargains here are old tools and kitchen utensils. The city has renovated the warehouses of the Old Port (Vieux Port) as an entertainment area with concerts, open-air theater, a craftware market, and a couple of handsome old sailing ships.
Beyond the City Wall
From the Parc de l’Esplanade, drive up the Côte de la Citadelle hill road and through a tunnel for a guided tour around a powerful bastion of fears long gone. The French built the starshaped Citadel in 1750 to resist the British. The British enlarged it in 1820 to defend Québec City against the Americans, but their cannons never fired a shot in anger. The garrison was British-manned for only 20 years before being handed over to Canadian troops. Today it is the home of Canada’s crack Royal 22nd Regiment.
In summertime the garrison comes to life with the Changing of the Guard (10am daily, June 24–first week of Sept.) and Beating the Retreat (6pm Wed–Sat during July and August). The old powder house serves now as the Musée Militaire, displaying the regiment’s history with its trophies, weapons, and uniforms.
Running southwest from the Parc de l’Esplanade, the broad, modern Grande-Allée runs past the Assemblée Nationale (provincial parliament), built from 1877–1886 in the favored style of the time, French Renaissance. This has been the citadel of Québec’s quest for a special identity in or outside the Canadian Confederation, especially under Prime Minister René Lévesque.
On Boulevard St-Cyrille, the Grand Théâtre de Québec was inaugurated in 1971 as Québec City’s arts center and home of the Québec Symphony Orchestra. Battlefields Park (Parc des Champs de Bataille, 390 rue de Bernieres) is devoted to the momentous battle on the Plains of Abraham that decided the fate of Québec in 1759. Quite apart from its historical significance, the park offers delightful walks across the treelined fields. In the center of the park you’ll see a massive Martello tower, built in 1805, as part of Québec’s new defenses against a potential American attack. In a town where every monument seems like a political statement, rue Wolfe leads to one on the spot where General Wolfe was mortally wounded, while anonymous Québécois patriots have responded with a statue of Joan of Arc, off the Avenue George VI.
In the southern half of the park, the Musée de Québec possesses a first-rate collection of Québécois painting and sculpture, as well as historic furniture, jewelry, and gold and silver church ornaments. The sculpture is principally from the 18th century, but the paintings range from the colony’s beginnings to the present day. Look for the historical studies of Joseph Légaré, the portraits of Antoine Plamondon and Théodore Hamel, and landscapes of Cornelius Krieghoff. Among the moderns are the Automatiste abstracts of Jean-Paul Riopelle and the optical art of Jacques Hurtubise.
Côte de Charlevoix
A day trip along the St. Lawrence River on Highway 360 north of Québec City will give you a glimpse of village life and the challenging landscape in which the habitants created their farms. Côte de Charlevoix is part of the Laurentian heights, reaching to the Saguenay River where the coureurs de bois turned off in search of furs.
At the northern edge of town, turn right after the Montmorency River bridge into a park where a terrace overlooks the impressive Montmorency Falls, plunging 91 m (274 ft) into the river.
Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré is a major pilgrimage town for torch-lit processions in summer to the glory of the mother of the Virgin Mary. Beyond the town, in a sudden confrontation with the wilderness, a walkway in the forest takes you up close to the pounding waters of the 80-m (240-ft) Ste-Anne Falls, ragged and crashing around the boulders, a much less neat and tidy cascade than Montmorency. Painters and craftsmen who have made their home in the fishing village of Baie-St-Paul will be more than happy to sell you their work.
In a country boasting one of the world’s biggest paper industries, you’ll find here one last town, St-Joseph-de-la-Rive, where you can buy handmade paper, perfect for writing home with distinction. On the wharf, take a ferry across to the lovely little Ile aux Coudres, another fishing community that has become a favorite artists’ haunt. The island’s homecrafts include weaving the rough Québécois rag rugs known as catalognes. You may be tempted into an overnight stay by the colorful inns and folksong taverns run by retired seamen, who look as if they escaped the old schooner stranded at the southwest end of the island. These salts do cook up a fine heart-warming fish soup. When Jacques Cartier got to the island, his sailors made a feast of the hazelnuts, for which coudres is an old French word.
Ever since U.S. president William H. Taft built himself a holiday home out at Pointe-au-Pic at the beginning of the century, La Malbaie has enjoyed a reputation as the region’s smartest resort town, offering horseback-riding, golf, and tennis. Stop at the grand old Manoir Richelieu hotel at least for tea on the superbly manicured lawns overlooking the river. 
Gaspé Peninsula
Gaspé, the first Canadian landfall of Jacques Cartier in 1534, is a Micmac Indian word for Land’s End, and this is indeed southern Québec’s most remote region, 700 km (420 miles) from Québec City. But it’s well worth the trip for anyone with four or five days to spare and eager to get away from the throng into this still-unspoiled wilderness on the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Densely wooded river valleys and sheltered coves break up the rugged north coast, with its steep cliffs plunging down to broad pebble or fine sandy beaches. The Chics-Chocs Mountains of the interior, the highest in eastern Canada, are the northern “terminal” of the Appalachian Range that begins down in Alabama.
Descendants of Acadians and Loyalists, the warm and friendly Gaspesians are a more harmonious mix of French- and English-speaking citizens than elsewhere in Québec. In a region without any noteworthy industry other than cod fishing, a little forestry, and tourism, the people add to their income by selling their craftwork and farm produce from improvised stands. 
At the tip of the peninsula, Forillon National Park offers great facilities for fishing, boat cruises, skin-diving (wetsuits are obligatory), and hiking. In this most spectacular of land- and seascapes, even the least artistic of you will be tempted to take up painting or at least photography. Look out for the whales and grey seals in the gulf. Wildlife inside the park includes fat little porcupine, hare, red squirrel, deer, moose and an occasional bear, lynx, and fox. Birdwatchers have 200 species to feast their eyes on, with guillemots and cormorants among the easier to spot. The town of Gaspé makes its livelihood from fishing — cod and herring. It offers good opportunities for sailing and windsurfing (again, wetsuits obligatory). On the rue du Monument is a granite cross commemorating the wooden cross that Jacques Cartier planted on behalf of his French sovereign in front of a bemused audience of Iroquois.
The best hotels are in the resort town of Percé, so this is naturally the most crowded place on the peninsula. People come for watersports and to marvel at the cliffs pierced (percé) by the sea. Erosion originally created two arches in the 94-m- (82-ft-) high rocks, but one has since crumbled. See them at sunrise when they’re pink. Take a cruise around Bonaventure Island to view the penguins and puffins.
THE ATLANTIC
The Atlantic coastal provinces lie off Canada’s beaten track. This implies many advantages for tourists seeking lovely unspoiled countryside away from the crowds, but also, for the residents, some acute political and economic disadvantages. Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.), and New Brunswick make up the Maritime Provinces, more commonly known as the Maritimes. Last to join the Canadian Confederation, in 1949, the offshore island of Newfoundland is linked as one province with the mainland region of Labrador.
The Maritimes and Newfoundland, together now known as the Atlantic Provinces, have often felt neglected. They were the last provinces to benefit from transcontinental railways and highways. New Brunswick’s shipbuilding timber suffered in the age of steam and steel hulls. Newfoundland’s fisheries were equally hard hit when modern refrigeration made it possible for foreign companies to dispense with the island’s centuries-old drying techniques. Economic hardship prompted some to migrate to other regions.
But this separateness has shaped a hardy people of considerable character and charm. Just getting to know them makes the journey worthwhile. You’ll find them cheerful, friendly, and more easily approachable than the big-city folk of Ontario and Québec. Newfoundland is peopled almost exclusively from the southwest of England and southern Ireland, whence the special music and color of their dialect (see page 145). The Maritimes have been mainly settled by Scottish Highlanders, German Protestants, and French-speaking Acadians.
The cooler climate makes the region a strictly summer and early autumn destination. It’s a land of hiking, camping, and fishing, with some good swimming off Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. If the Maritimes are warm to mellow from late June to early September, Newfoundland is a little fresher.
Nova Scotia
You’d think the chamber of commerce carved their map as a public relations gimmick, but the province really is shaped like a lobster. In any case, many a gourmet or glutton feels that a Halifax lobster dinner is reason enough to make the trip. But weight watchers can enjoy Nova Scotia, too.
There’s the sparkling Atlantic coastline, with its delightful little fishing ports. Or rolling green hills across the interior to the orchards and dairy farms of Annapolis Valley. This western side of the peninsula is rich in the poignant history of French Acadia. The province’s northern island is the site of one of Canada’s best-loved national parks, Cape Breton Highlands, where you’ll drive the spectacular Cabot Trail along the coast and in and out of the forest.
Halifax
Ships of the Canadian navy jostle with the trawlers of Nova Scotia’s commercial fisheries in this major Atlantic port. But the prevailing tone is one of more relaxed pleasure, typified by the yachts and sailboats gliding gracefully in and out of the Northwest Arm marinas.
Attracted by the natural harbor, one of the world’s largest, the British established the town in the mid-18th century as a naval garrison and shipyard to counter the French fortress of Louisbourg farther north on Cape Breton (see page 130). Halifax’s strategic position on the Atlantic soon proved even more invaluable as a base for “farming” the rich shoals of cod and herring on the ocean’s Scotian Shelf. In this haven for pirates and rum-runners, Samuel Cunard (1787–1865) founded his famous transatlantic shipping line with a fortune acquired in large part from privateering.
Down on the harborfront today, the old wharves, warehouses, even the houses of joyous ill-repute that cluster in back streets around any international port have been refurbished as Historic Properties, a bright and breezy neighborhood of artists’ studios and galleries, shops, restaurants, and taverns with open-air terraces. The boardwalk takes you through a colorful architecture of red brick, timber, grey stone, and gaily painted clapboard. Summer attractions include a puppet theater, concerts, lobster races, and windsurfing competitions. At the international tournament of town criers, hear local newsmongers in 18th-century costume pitting their Oyez! against the best bellowers from Britain and Bermuda.
Anchored by Privateers’ Warehouse (Halifax was a popular haven for pirates from the Napoleonic Wars to the rum-running Prohibition Era of the 1920s) is a grand racing schooner, Bluenose II. You can walk the decks or even take a two-hour cruise on this replica of the famous 1921 champion sailship portrayed on the Canadian ten-cent coin. “Bluenose” was the Americans’ nickname for Nova Scotia’s wind-whipped sailors. If the schooner is out of port on one of its frequent goodwill tours down the Atlantic coast, there are several other harbor cruises well worth taking, to view the shipyards, naval installations, and fishing fleet, as well as the yacht clubs and elegant waterfront homes on the Northwest Arm inlet.
Also on the harbor, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic (1675 Lower Water Street,) is housed in a turn-of-the-century ship chandlery, setting the tone with a nostalgic whiff of tarred rope in the restored shop on the ground floor. The museum traces the dockyards’ 200-year history, displaying naval instruments, weapons, and some superb ship models from sail to steam, including the Aquitania ocean liner. A special section is devoted to shipwrecks on the notorious Sable Island. Berthed at the museum’s wharf is the 1913 survey vessel, Acadia, that charted the coasts of eastern Canada from Nova Scotia to Hudson Bay.
Downtown, on Hollis Street, Province House, a dignified Georgian stone building (1819), boasts Canada’s oldest legislative assembly, instigated by New England Loyalists. A statue of Joseph Howe stands in front; he was Nova Scotia’s champion of a free press and democratic government, but a fierce opponent of joining the Confederation.
For a good panoramic view of Halifax and a sense of its important military history, make your way around the grassy slopes leading to the star-shaped Citadel, from which a cannon-shot has boomed across the town each day at noon since the 1850s. A good guided tour takes you around the garrison, originally built for 300 British soldiers. It is surrounded by a deep, wide, dry moat, thick walls, and fortified grass-covered earthworks. The Cavalier Building has been restored to the way it was in 1869 and is now an Army Museum with uniforms, weapons, and the models of three previous city fortresses. The South Magazine stored powder barrels uncomfortably close to military prisoners who were kept, with the cannons, in the Garrison Cells. Canadian troops used the Citadel as barracks in both world wars, while anti-aircraft batteries were installed there in World War II. In summer, students in the kilted uniform of the 78th Highlanders perform infantry and artillery drills. The Nova Scotia Tattoo stages more spectacular military bagpipe parades, highland dances, singing, and a Naval Gun Run competition at the nearby Halifax Metro Center in late June, early July.
From the Citadel, looking east, you can see the city’s popular landmark, the Old Town Clock. This octagonal tower was erected in 1803 by Prince Edward, tough commander of the Nova Scotia forces and future father of Queen Victoria. At the south end of Grand Parade, opposite the city hall, stands St. Paul’s (1750), Canada’s oldest Anglican church.
West of the Citadel, on Summer Street, the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History is devoted to the province’s human and natural history. It exhibits Indian clothing, tools, and artifacts, with local Micmac Indians demonstrating their use, and colonial ceramics, glassware, and pinewood furniture (often artfully painted to imitate more expensive mahogany or oak). Regional wildlife on display ranges from dinosaurs to moose, bear, coyotes, and bald eagles. The Halifax Public Gardens, south of the museum, makes a pleasant stroll around the duck pond and among such exquisite Asian trees as the Chinese gingko and white-flowered dove tree, the Japanese lilac and larch, and a corkscrew birch. Try to be here for an utterly Victorian open-air band concert.
The town’s most attractive piece of greenery is Point Pleasant Park, whose beach and shady woods make it ideal for picnics. At the southern tip of the Halifax peninsula, the park provides a fine vantage point from which to watch the big ships in the harbor and the yachts on the Northwest Arm. Among old ruined fortifications is the still intact Prince of Wales Martello Tower, a massive stone structure serving as barracks, weapons storage, and artillery platform, built by Prince Edward in 1796.
Collectors of lore about the Titanic ocean liner, which sank south of Newfoundland in 1912, can find the tombs of many of the victims in the Fairview Cemetery on the northwest side of town.
Atlantic Coast
Scores of lighthouses along Nova Scotia’s south shore trace a sawtoothed route of coves that over the ages offered shelter to pirates, rum-runners, and fishermen. For the modern holidaymaker, there are plenty of pleasant bathing beaches, too.
The 45-minute, 48-km (30-mile) drive along winding coastal Highway 333 from Halifax southwest to Peggy’s Cove has become a photographer’s pilgrimage. This almost unbearably picturesque fishing village perches its brightly colored clapboard cottages and lighthouse among massive granite boulders. The trick is to keep the snack-bars and souvenir shops out of the picture.
You’ll find more deserted coves and beaches around St. Margaret’s Bay as you drive on to Chester, 79 km (49 miles) west of Peggy’s Cove on Mahone Bay. This fashionable resort town was founded in 1759 by Massachusetts fishermen and remains a favorite vacation spot for New Englanders.
Inland, 20 minutes’ drive from Chester north along Highway 12, you can visit Ross Farm, a living museum of 300 years of Nova Scotia farming. Oxcarts and horse-drawn haywagons take you around the property, where you can watch barrel-making, see the old farm implements in action, and buy produce from the farm kitchen and locally made craftware. Take a boat trip from the town of Mahone Bay to Oak Island. Dreamers still dig for the gold doubloons, emeralds, rubies, and diamonds that Captain William Kidd, lovable villain of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, is said to have buried here. This real-life Scots-born 17th-century brigand received the official blessing of the British governor of New York to plunder French, Spanish, and Dutch ships from the Caribbean to Madagascar, frequently hiding out on the Nova Scotia coast. That blessing didn’t keep him from being hanged in London, convicted of murder and acts of piracy.
Down the coast from Mahone Bay, Lunenburg, the original 18th-century settlement of German Protestants, is an attractive town of grey-weathered shingleboard houses. Its proud boast in modern times is the building of the original Bluenose racing schooner. On the waterfront, the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic will give you a vivid sense of the whole history of sailing and fishing along Nova Scotia’s coasts. Besides a beautiful model of the Bluenose, the museum’s star attractions are two old ships moored in the port: the schooner Theresa E. Connor used for cod fishing and the trawler Cape Sable. Across Lunenburg Harbor, take a clifftop hike through the little pine forest and around the striking rock formations of The Ovens. These deep caves were the scene of a mini gold rush in 1861, when New Englanders poured into the area to pan a few — very few — nuggets from the shale on the beach. A little museum shows you their tools, techniques, and a few molar-sized bits of gold.
Annapolis Valley
Route 101 takes you from Halifax northwest across the peninsula through Annapolis Valley’s fertile farmland of apple orchards, strawberry fields, and cattle pastures. This is the heart of Nova Scotia’s French Acadia.
In Windsor, stop off to see the 18th-century blockhouse at Fort Edward (named after Governor Edward Cornwallis), grim monument to the British military presence that prepared the deportation. The dispersal began out at Grand-Pré, now a national historic park commemorating the Acadians’ resilience. This was the center of a thriving farming community which built dykes to reclaim marshland from the Minas Basin, grew fruit and vegetables, and raised cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry. Their farms were destroyed by the British in 1704, recaptured by the French in 1747, and held just eight years till the 2,000-strong community was expelled, to return a few years later and re-establish their farms all over again. A stone church, faintly Norman in style, was erected in the park in 1930 as a memorial to Acadian culture and history. The bronze statue in the gardens is not a saint, but Evangeline, sad heroine of Henry Longfellow’s poem on the deportation. Along the Annapolis River road, such pretty little villages as Middleton, Lawrencetown, and Bridgetown bear the unmistakable mark of the New Englanders who moved into the region to take over the Acadians’ farms.
On the estuary, the peaceful town of Annapolis Royal was once the beleaguered target of 14 British and French sieges and countless pirate raids. Formerly Port Royal, it was renamed after England’s Queen Anne and became capital of Nova Scotia until the foundation of Halifax. Fort Anne National Historic Site, focus for the belligerence, is now a pleasant park of grassy knolls and ridges, remains of the earthwork defenses. Of the original buildings, only a powder house in the southwest bastion and a storehouse in the northwest survive. The officers’ quarters of 1797 have been reconstructed to house a museum of local Indian culture and natural history. Epitome of the town’s more peaceful side, the Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens south of the city center display flora representative of the region’s inhabitants: mayflower and pines for the Micmacs; iris and the vegetables the Acadians grew, with a reconstruction of their ingenious system of dykes and a typical Acadian cottage; an English rose arbor; and Victorian flower beds. A marsh lookout gives you a good view over the estuary. In the town center, the shops and taverns on Lower St. George Street are being transformed to recapture the grace of the town’s Victorian era. Port Royal (10 km/6 miles west along Highway 1) is a fine recreation of Samuel de Champlain’s timbered Abitation, built in 1605. Furniture, utensils, and craftware, supplemented by audiovisual shows, give a vivid insight into the earliest permanent European settlement north of Florida. You can see how the French settlers, just 60 to begin with, made friendly contact with the Micmac. And hear how Champlain kept up morale throughout the long winters with a social club, L’Ordre du Bon Temps (The Order of Good Times). Each member would organize a fortnightly banquet of game and fish he had caught himself. Among the entertainments they concocted to cheer up the long cold evenings was a play, Le Théâtre de Neptune. North America’s first known full-length drama was written by the colony’s lawyer, Marc Lescarbot. His writings, along with Champlain’s journals, provided the basis for the reconstitution of their environment.
Cape Breton Island
The airport outside the steel town of Sydney is the most convenient gateway for both the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Park to the east and the Cabot Trail to the west, leading to Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
You may like to drive the more roundabout coast road over to Louisbourg with a side trip to Glace Bay. As an intriguing exercise in modern industrial archaeology, its desolate log cabins and colliery installations have become a coal mining village museum. Take the fascinating trip along the shafts and galleries of the abandoned Ocean Deep Mine, which reaches 17 km (11 miles) under the sea. You can have a coal miner’s meal at the colliery canteen. The great French fortress town of Louisbourg is presented as a splendid national historic park, one of the most elaborate in Canada’s ambitious reconstruction program. You’ll need a full day to do it justice. After the guided tour, take time to discuss extra details of 18th-century French colonial life with the well-informed and entertaining costumed volunteers performing the roles of fishermen, merchants, soldiers, and craftspeople (Tel. [phone], <www.fortresslouisbourg.com>).
Building of the original fortress began in 1719, six years after the Treaty of Utrecht had left the French only Cape Breton Island. The ice-free port provided a year-round strategic defense of approaches to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Québec, and a commercial base for cod fishing, trade with the Caribbean, and smuggling to and from New England. The reconstruction of one-fifth of the town recaptures life as it was in the summer of 1744, a year before the first great British siege, and 16 years before it was destroyed.
You are plunged into the atmosphere of that “moment in time” as soon as you get off the park bus at the Georges des Roches fishing property, a long turf-roofed log cabin outside the fortified town. The men may be laying out dozens of cod to dry on what are known as flakes, the same trestled wooden racks still used in fishing villages all down the coast. At the drawbridge to Porte Dauphine, the main entrance gate bearing a relief of three fleurs-de-lys, the French royal coat of arms, you’ll be stopped by French soldiers to check whether you’re a British spy.
If they let you through (they usually do), walk past the Dauphin bastion to the handsomely carved stone portside gate, Porte Frédéric. Turn right into the town along the main street, past the hospitable eating establishments of the Hôtel de la Marine and L’Epée Royale, where you can get a characteristic 18th-century meal served on tin or pewter plates. Continue over to the King’s Bastion, the military barracks where living conditions show the kind of stark contrast that nurtured enough discontent to cause a mutiny in that year of 1744. The gabled Governor’s Wing numbers ten luxurious apartments with fine furniture, tapestries, silks, brocades, silverware, and delicate porcelain. The neighboring Officers’ Quarters are more humble but still comfortable enough, while the ordinary soldiers’ barracks are downright miserable, with rudimentary beds of straw. In the middle of the block, a simple little chapel tries to keep the peace.
Back in Sydney, follow the Trans-Canada Highway west to the Englishtown exit for the ferry across St. Ann’s Bay to join the Cabot Trail at Indian Brook. This 300-km (180-mile) trail offers one of the country’s most spectacular drives, with dramatic juxtapositions of dense pine forest, sheer cliffs, and the ocean. Travel north along the Gaelic Coast, a name amply justified by the thick Scottish burr you’ll hear from most of the very friendly people you speak to on the way. At Cape Smokey, so called for the fogs that shroud it in winter and a few unlucky summer days, take the ski-lift that operates in summer for the view up and down the coast and over to the Cape Breton Highlands.
Ingonish is a popular resort town on two bays with fine sandy beaches, offering excellent sailing, fishing, and swimming. Have at least a drink at the Keltic Lodge hotel, an old Nova Scotia landmark worth a visit for its view of Cape Smokey.
Cape Breton Highlands National Park is a joy for all nature-lovers. The Cabot Trail leads you around the periphery, but clearly marked hiking trails (maps at the Ingonish park entrance) take you into the interior. Among the 27 hiking trails the best are the Glasgow Lakes trail to John Deer Lake and the trail around Beulach Ban Falls and French Mountain. Camping facilities on the edge of the park are better equipped than those marked out inside the forest. These “New Scottish” highlands look uncannily like those in the old country. To ram the point home, there’s even a Scottish shepherd’s cottage, Lone Shieling, off the highway at Grande Anse River. The forest, a mixture of conifers and hardwoods, shelters white-tailed deer, black bear, moose, beaver, red fox, lynx, mink, and snowshoe hare. Bird-watchers can spot, among many species, red-tailed hawk and the occasional bald eagle. Fishermen should get their license at the park entrance to angle for trout or salmon (no motorboats allowed). On the northeast corner of the park, Neil Harbor is a pleasant little fishing port with sandy beaches.
To explore the northern tip of the island, leave the park at South Harbor and drive 16 km (10 miles) to the fishing village of Bay St. Lawrence. Following a common seaport custom, the white clapboard village church, with its nave shaped like an upturned ship, was designed and built by local shipwrights. Take a bracing hike along the grassy cliff top west of town, but beware of the winds. Southwest of the park, Chéticamp is an old stronghold of Acadian culture, with a museum exhibiting craftware as it was crocheted, spun, hooked, or woven in bygone centuries. At the museum’s little restaurant you can sample a traditional meal of clam chowder, meat pâté, and molasses cakes. Expert anglers insist that the salmon fishing near Margaree Forks is the best in eastern Canada. North East Margaree has a salmon museum devoted to the fish’s life cycle and the cunning tricks of poachers.
In a fairytale setting of wooded hills around Bras d’Or (Golden Arm) Lake, Baddeck, a popular tourist center, likes to be known as the place in which telephone-inventor Alexander Graham Bell chose to spend the last, very active years of his life. His home, hidden in the forest, is not open to the public, but the superbly organized museum in the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Park shows how the great man devoted his energies in Baddeck to aviation. Besides his invention of the tetrahedral kite, the exhibits illustrate his work on the telephone and inventions of medical and maritime instruments. The museum gives plenty of space to photos of his family life in Edinburgh, the United States, and Baddeck — which reminded him of countryside near Edinburgh. If this has whetted your taste for things Scottish, end your tour at the southern tip of St. Ann’s Bay, where Gaelic College gives summer courses in bagpipe-playing, dancing, and tartan-weaving. Even if you’re not tempted to sign up, you can watch classes in progress. In August, the Gaelic Mod gathers Scots old and Nova for a grand competition.
Prince Edward Island
Canada’s smallest province, just 224 km (139 miles) long and only 64 km (40 miles) across at its widest point, has a gentle rural atmosphere of rolling green meadows in the interior, with a coast of long sandy beaches at the foot of terra-cotta cliffs. The island nestles snugly in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, separated from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia by the Northumberland Strait. More than three-quarters of the area is given over to farmland. Rich in iron oxides, the red soil is best for potatoes, but farmers also grow succulent blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. If the island’s lobsters are a worthy rival to Nova Scotia’s, its finest seafood is the oysters of Malpeque Bay.
Jacques Cartier named the island Ile St-Jean when he spotted it in the 16th century, but the French didn’t colonize it until after their retrenchment following the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. Like Nova Scotia, the island was transformed by the Acadians’ deportation and their replacement by New Englanders, who named it after Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, in 1799. The New Englanders preferred to exploit their property as absentee landlords, leaving it mainly to Irish and Scottish immigrants to clear the forests for shipbuilding and agriculture. P.E.I.’s great historic moment came in 1864, when its capital, Charlottetown, hosted a meeting of Maritime leaders with delegates from Ontario and Québec to chart the path to Canada’s federal status as a united dominion. The new Confederation Bridge connects Prince Edward Island (at Borden-Carleton) with Cape Tormentine in New Brunswick, raising fears that the island will lose its distinct character.
After potatoes (winning P.E.I. the name of “Spud Island,” a less grandiloquent alternative to “Cradle of Confederation”), tourism rates as the number two industry. The superb sandy beaches of the north coast attract over half a million visitors a year. Fans of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables can visit here the landscape in which it was set.
After visiting centrally located Charlottetown, you can take three well-marked scenic drives around the island: Blue Heron in the center, Lady Slipper to the west, and Kings Byway to the east, corresponding roughly to the three counties, Queens, Prince, and Kings.
Charlottetown
P.E.I.’s only city (population 30,000) sets the tone of the island’s low-key charm. Named after the wife of George III of England, the town offers a colorful mix of greenery, characteristic red stone, and Victorian gingerbread. It’s a busy port, a commercial and tourist center, but remains resolutely old-fashioned.
Starting in Confederation Plaza, visit Province House, the sober grey sandstone Georgian building in which the “Fathers of the Confederation” met in 1864. Originally a courthouse, it is now the seat of the provincial legislature. Confederation Chamber has been preserved with the names of the august delegates, a very dignified setting for an affair that was in fact characterized by somewhat extravagant wining and dining.
Next door stands the modern Confederation Centre of the Arts opened in 1964 to commemorate the Confederation Conference’s centenary. The complex includes a museum, art gallery, theater, and library. Look in the gallery for the late 19th-century work of P.E.I. portraitist Robert Harris, celebrated for his group picture of the Fathers of the Confederation. The center is also the focus for the Charlottetown Summer Festival. Across the street, Hughes Drug Store is said to be the oldest operating pharmacy in Canada. Many of the original fittings are still in place. You’ll find exhibits relating to the island’s history in Beaconsfield, a gracious Victorian mansion on Kent Street. In July, the annual Strawberry Fair takes over the grounds.
Blue Heron Drive
The 190-km (118-mile) circuit follows the north shore, with its barrier islands, windswept dunes, red cliffs, and salt marshes, and around to the Northumberland Strait. From Charlottetown, head north to the great beaches of P.E.I. National Park. The north shore’s amazingly warm water (22°C/172°F in summer) offers the balmiest bathing in the Maritimes. The park includes the most popular attraction on the whole island, Green Gables House, a neat white-frame farmhouse with green shutters. Lucy Maud Montgomery lived here as a child and later used it as the setting for her novel, Anne of Green Gables.
Lady Slipper Drive
Starting out from Summerside, this 288-km (173-mile) western circuit around Prince County, named after the provincial flower, takes you through the Acadian community (close to 15,000) living on the south coast around Egmont Bay. Many of the villages fly the Acadians’ blue, white, and red flag modeled on that of France, but with a single star added to the blue band. Visit the Miscouche Acadian Museum, just west of Summerside, and an Acadian Pioneer Settlement at Mont-Carmel. The island’s 19th-century shipbuilding industry is featured in Green Park museum and historic house at Port Hill. Gourmets head straight for the renowned oysters of Malpeque Bay. Out in the bay, on Lennox Island, is a settlement of Micmac Indians.
Kings Byway Drive
East of Charlottetown, the longest of the circuits, 375 km (233 miles), encompasses pleasant beaches, rugged, red-stone capes and coves, shady forests, lobster and tuna fisheries, and potato and fruit farms.
The Orwell Corner Historic Village at Eldon includes some of the original log cabins built in the early 1800s by Scottish settlers. Visit the Basin Head Fisheries Museum at the east end of the island. On the north shore, at St. Peters, boats can be chartered for deep-sea fishing.
New Brunswick
With a rugged coastline and an interior covered 85% by forest, the province is popular with nature-loving campers in general and fishermen and hunters in particular. Anglers can hope for trout, bass, pickerel, and salmon, while hunters go for the duck and grouse. Wildlife enthusiasts may also spot red deer, black bear, and moose in the forests. The Bay of Fundy’s 16 m (50 ft) high tides produce remarkable effects in the river estuaries and along the coast.
Linked to Nova Scotia by the narrow Chignecto Isthmus, New Brunswick became a separate province in 1784 at the demand of 14,000 Loyalist refugees. It took its name from the German duchy then ruled by George III of England. The Loyalists joined earlier settlers from New England, Pennsylvania, and Yorkshire, and French Acadians who had trickled back after their deportation during the Anglo-French wars. Today, one-third of the population is French-speaking, the rest English.
Saint John
The province’s largest town (where it is the custom never to abbreviate “Saint” to ���St.”) is a port in the estuary of the Saint John River. It is the center of an important paper and pulp industry and has shipyards and oil refineries, but the city fathers have worked miracles to beautify the waterfront. Mists rising from the Bay of Fundy add a touch of romance and mystery.
One of the town’s main attractions is the natural phenomenon of the Bay of Fundy’s extraordinary tides, with a variation from low to high tide of 8.5 m (26 ft) at the mouth of the Saint John River. Watch the Reversing Falls Rapids from the bridge on Highway 100. The tourist information office there will tell you the best times to watch the tides’ evolution. At low tide, the Fundy’s waters are 4 m (13 ft) lower than the Saint John River, causing it to cascade through a narrow gorge into the bay. Gradually the flow slows down as the tide begins to rise again. At the tide’s turn, the slack enables ships to pass the rapids before the flow builds up in the opposite direction. The bay’s high tide of more than 4 m (13 ft) above the river thrusts all the way inland to Fredericton, 130 km (78 miles) away. On your riverside walk in Falls View Park, try to ignore the pulp mill.
The bright new downtown area lovingly blends a modern and 19th-century atmosphere, especially along red-brick King Street. To suit all kinds of weather, skywalks and underground galleries link shopping and entertainment centers. Market Square is the attractive hub of the harborfront renovation, a multi-level complex of shops, apartments, hotel, and cafés, surrounding an atrium in what were once just ugly warehouses. The Ocean Hawker II tug moored at Market Slip has been converted into a bar. At nearby Barbour’s General Store, an authentic 19th-century grocery, try the local specialty of dulse, an edible seaweed that is New Brunswick’s answer to chewing gum. It was at Market Slip that a contingent of 3,000 Loyalists landed in 1783 to found the city of Saint John. The event is commemorated in July by the Loyalists Days festival, with processions along the harbor and dancing in the streets, all performed in the 18th-century costume.
New Brunswick Museum (277 Douglas Avenue) is devoted principally to the province’s grand old shipbuilding industry, the source of considerable prosperity before timber had to bow to the new age of steam and steel. There are also interesting exhibits on the life of Micmac Indians and New Brunswick’s animals and plants.
Bay of Fundy
Take Highway 1 northeast from Saint John and turn off at Penobsquis to head for Fundy National Park, a wonderful nature reserve with an emphasis on the seashore and its spectacular high tides. At the park entrance, you can get detailed maps of the 110 km (68 miles) of hiking and biking trails linking campgrounds and chalets inside the park. An arts-and-crafts school offers courses in wood-carving and copper jewelry for adults, and basket-weaving and glass-painting for children. On Bennett Lake, you can rent a canoe or fish from a rowboat. On the shore, walk along the flats at low tide to seek out periwinkles, barnacles, and sea anemones underneath the rocks. Herring Cove gives you a good view and detailed explanations of the tides.
Take a side-trip to Hopewell Cape at the mouth of the Petit-codiac River. If you can, camp overnight, as dawn is the perfect time to enjoy the view of its red cliffs and bizarre pillars of granite topped with tufts of balsam fir and black spruce, revealed at low tide. The rocks have been buffeted into what the tourist office calls the Grant Flowerpots.
Fredericton
New Brunswick’s capital is a pleasant, sleepy little town most notable for the splendid Beaverbrook Art Gallery. It was built by William Maxwell Aitken (1879–1964), who as Lord Beaverbrook became a great British press baron and a member of Winston Churchill’s war cabinet. (Although born in Ontario, he took his title from his home in Beaverbrook, New Brunswick.) Look for Graham Sutherland’s imposing portrait of the publisher of London’s Daily Express and other fiercely patriotic newspapers. But the gallery’s masterpiece is Salvador Dalí’s Santiago el Grande. Other important works include the English school of Reynolds, Turner, Gainsborough, and Romney, and Canadian paintings by Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, and Cornelius Krieghoff.
The mid-19th-century Neo-Gothic Christ Church Cathedral, with fine stained-glass windows and wooden beams, seems transplanted straight from the English countryside. In keeping with this spirit is the Changing of the Guard that you can watch on summer mornings at Officers’ Square.
Explore the Saint John River west of Fredericton on a pretty 37-km (23-mile) excursion out to King’s Landing Historical Settlement, a reconstitution of a characteristic Loyalist village at the end of the 18th century. Veterans of the King’s American Dragoons established a logging and shipbuilding community here, and their tasks are reenacted today with remarkable authenticity. The waterwheel-driven sawmill still operates, as do a theater and an inn, the King’s Head, serving old-fashioned meals. 
Newfoundland
Without detracting from the significance of Columbus’s landing on the Bahamas, Newfoundland can lay a just claim to being the true beginning of Europe’s adventure in North America. Anyone seeking to understand Canada’s role in shaping North America should spare a few days for this bracing province of hardy fisherfolk — first Canadian land to be “found” and last to join the Confederation (incorporating Labrador), in 1949. The land and seascapes are impressively rugged and the spirited people a sheer delight. Life in isolated fishing communities has given the Newfies a keen sense of local identity. Citizens of the capital of St. John’s are “townees,” those on the outskirts “bay-men,” and the towns beyond are known as “outports.” “Canadian” is still reserved for a mainlander.
“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God,” says the provincial motto. “But on your way, look out for Newfoundland,” seems to have been the slogan of the old North Atlantic navigators, from the good Irish Abbot Brendan in the sixth century and the wild Norsemen in the 11th, to all the Basque, French, Spanish, and Portuguese fishermen who preceded explorer John Cabot, paid £10 by Henry VII for finding “the new isle” in 1497.
It was the fishermen who really knew what the island was worth — the Grand Banks to the east of Newfoundland are the richest breeding ground of cod in the world. For centuries, the island existed only for its offshore fish. Any permanent settlement was actively discouraged, so as not to compete with Britain’s West Country merchants. Even after the first serious colonization of the 18th century, the forests of the interior were exploited just for building fishermen’s cottages and their ships. No towns were built away from the coast.
St. John’s
Local folklore insists that the name (not to be confused with Saint John, New Brunswick) comes from the saint’s day of John the Baptist, June 24, when John Cabot arrived here in 1497.
Newfoundland’s capital and largest city retains the simple allure of the fishing port it has always been, and the picturesque harbor is the place to begin. In the 19th century the town burned down five times, but it still stubbornly builds wooden houses overlooking the waterfront. Their brightly painted walls add a welcome touch of color to the gaunt grey trawlers in the docks — from Britain, of course, but also Russia and even Japan. Parallel to the harbor, you’ll find on Gower Street the prettiest Victorian houses, painted burgundy, lemon, burnt sienna, dove grey, and white.
Newfoundland Museum, on Duckworth Street, recounts the human history of the island, displaying the dwellings and artifacts of the Inuit and native peoples, including the now-extinct Beothuk, and the costume, furniture, and implements of the first European fishermen. Another section of the museum, in the shopping center of the Murray Premises down on Harbour Drive, is devoted to the province’s colorful seafaring history.
Safely up on a hill on Military Road, the Catholic Basilica of St. John the Baptist (1850) escaped the numerous fires to dominate the town’s skyline with its granite and limestone towers. Down on Gower Street, the Anglican Cathedral, also named after John the Baptist, burned down twice, and its simple Neo-Gothic 20th-century version is still without a steeple. 
For the best view of the harbor go up to Signal Hill, looking over the narrows and out to the Atlantic Ocean. The hill was fortified to guard the harbor entrance during the Napoleonic Wars, and you can still see cannon of the Queen’s Battery, installed in 1796. The Cabot Tower atop the hill was built in 1897, fourth centenary of Cabot’s landing and diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. Four years later, at 12:30pm, December 12, 1901, in a receiving station improvised near the tower in a hospital (burned down in 1920), Guglielmo Marconi suddenly yelled: “Do you hear that? Do you hear that?” What the Italian inventor was so excited about were three faint dots of the letter S in Morse, from his transmitter in Poldhu, Cornwall. The group of dour Newfie fishermen listening in were more impressed by this fellow jumping up and down than by history’s first transatlantic radio message. The event is commemorated by a modest exhibit in the Cabot Tower.
On the north side of the hill, Quidi Vidi (pronounced Kiddy Viddy) is a charming little fishing port with excellent seafood restaurants. On the first Wednesday in August, St. John’s Regatta, a race for six-oar rowing boats, is held on Quidi Vidi Lake. Begun in the 1820s, this oldest continuing sporting event in North America is also the occasion of a boisterous carnival.
Avalon Peninsula
The drive south down the peninsula from St. John’s takes you first out to Cape Spear, a windswept rocky promontory jutting out into the crashing waves of the Atlantic — easternmost point of North America (longitude 52°37’24”). This strategic position prompted the Americans to install two anti-submarine gun emplacements on the tip of the cape in World War II. The 1835 white clapboard lighthouse here has been restored with a jolly red-and-white striped dome, while a less-attractive modern concrete tower does all the work. Down at the bird sanctuary on Witless Bay, you can spot penguins, puffins, guillemots, and little auks. Best sightings are from mid-June to mid-July, when you can hire a boat from Bay Bulls out to Gull Island.
Marine Drive, north of St. John’s, takes you up a characteristically craggy coast through the fishing villages of Outer Cove, Middle Cove, and Torbay up to pretty Pouch Cove. Look out for the whales that pass down this coast in summer. On the shore, you’ll see the wooden trestled racks on which fishermen still dry their cod in the time-honored manner. For a view of Newfoundland at its wildest and most magnificently desolate, drive beyond Marine Drive on the gravel road leading to Cape St. Francis.
BRITISH COLUMBIA
“Such a land,” said Rudyard Kipling in 1908, “is good for an energetic man. It is also not bad for a loafer.” That’s still true today.
British Columbia, the third largest province, is supremely the land of the wild outdoors, with the constant challenge of rugged mountains, seemingly impenetrable forests, a jagged coastline, and dizzily fast-moving rivers. But its capital is the smiling, sleepy town of Victoria, evoking a genteel British past that the British themselves may well have forgotten. And the province’s principal city, with a population of 1.7 million, is the beautifully situated Vancouver, home of easy living, elegant architecture, and all the color and movement of an international port. Loafers love it.
Long after Northwest Coast Indians had found the region to be a hospitable land of plenty, it was explored and “worked” by Scottish fur traders who called it New Caledonia. When the discovery of gold on the Fraser River in 1858 brought in a flood of American adventurers, Britain decided it was time to take the land over from the Hudson’s Bay Company and create the colony of British Columbia. It joined the Dominion of Canada in 1871 on the understanding that the Canadian Pacific Railway would reach B.C. in the next decade (delay nearly caused secession). The C.P.R. choice of Vancouver as its terminus gave B.C. its major Pacific port.
The great boon of British Columbia, at least in the southwest corner where three-quarters of the population is clustered, is its gentle, relatively dry summers and mild (but rainy) winters. B.C.’s kind weather has been a major factor in attracting new blood in the westward expansion from Ontario, Québec, and the Maritimes.
Trees are the main source of B.C.’s prosperity. The spruce, fir, and cedar provide three-quarters of Canada’s construction lumber and considerable quantities of wood pulp and paper.
Much to the joy of sports fishermen, the salmon of the Pacific coast and the great rivers of the interior remains another vital natural resource. The threat of overfishing has been cut back, and, in a province where revenues from hydroelectric power are second only to those of Québec, the energy industry has been prevented from damming the Fraser so as not to damage the salmon’s spawning grounds.
B.C.’s population (4,000,000) is concentrated around the Strait of Georgia and along the U.S. border, with scarcely any inhabitants at all north of Prince Rupert. The people are still mainly British in origin, most of them Scottish. Other European immigrants are German, Dutch, Greek, Ukrainian, Italian, Scandinavian, and a few French. Native peoples number about 82,000. From across the Pacific, the province has attracted a large Asian community — Chinese, Japanese, and, of more recent arrival, Vietnamese, Pakistanis, and Indians.
Vancouver
The city’s setting in a magnificent bay embraced by soaring green mountains is one of those blessings that can turn any hard-boiled atheist into a believer. Cynicism dissolves with your first taste of the town’s gentle ambience, created by a clever combination of the comforts of sophisticated modernity with the simpler joys of the wilderness at its back door.
Expanding at a purposeful but more leisurely pace than other leading Canadian cities, Vancouver has never lost sight of the importance of enjoying life at the same time. Many business people from Toronto have been driven close to apoplexy by the relaxed style of their Vancouver colleagues. 
In keeping with this easy-going attitude, the city was originally known as Gastown, after saloon-keeper “Gassy Jack” Deighton, who looked after the needs of pioneer lumbermen and sailors in the 1860s. It was only when the town became C.P.R.’s West Coast railway terminus in 1886 that it took on the more dignified name of one of the region’s first European visitors, navigator George Vancouver. A fire in 1886 and property-developers left few traces of the 19th-century town, but bold contemporary architecture downtown and out at the Simon Fraser and University of British Columbia campuses blends beautifully with the mountain and ocean backdrop. Unsightly docklands have been cleaned up, and handsome new housing has been built on the waterfront.
First View
More than in most towns, Vancouver’s unique setting demands a carefully planned first view. The city is built around the broad English Bay, which funnels through First and Second Narrows into the Burrard Inlet, the waterway that George Vancouver explored in a scouting boat in 1791. The harbor separates the city proper, with the Stanley Park promontory, from its elegant north shore mountainside suburbs of West and North Vancouver. To take in all this, you need to begin from not one, but two observation points.
Cross the First Narrows on Lions Gate Bridge and take the Capilano Road for a cable-car ride, “Skyride,” up to Grouse Mountain and its grand view south over the city and harbor. Try to be there at sunset, too, to see the city light up. A favorite with skiers, the mountain also offers a fine view northwest over Capilano Lake and across to Vancouver Island. If you feel like a quick whiff of the wilderness on your way back, turn off to walk the swaying suspension bridge 76 m (230 ft) above the fast-flowing waters of Capilano Canyon.
To get an equally impressive view of the city set against its mountains, go downtown to the observation deck (and its restaurant, if you like) on top of the 40-story Harbour Centre (555 West Hastings Street). A bonus on clear days is a view south, with the long-range telescope, of Mount Baker across the American border in the state of Washington.
You’ll find the information office of Tourism British Columbia, at 865 Hornby Street, useful for details about the province. For the city, Greater Vancouver Convention & Visitors Bureau is at 200 Burrard Street, Plaza Level.
Downtown
The main streets through the West End peninsula to Stanley Park are Georgia and Robson. Georgia Street continues through the park to Lion’s Gate Bridge. Though you will need a car in this sprawling city, park it for your downtown tour and walk — traffic jams can be horrendous.
Start your tour of the city center at Robson Square, site of one of the true masterpieces of modern North American architecture, Arthur Erickson’s Courthouse. Characteristic of the Vancouver architect’s finest works, the building is conceived horizontally, only seven stories high but still the dominant focus among the skyscrapers towering above it. Revolutionizing the whole stuffy concept of law courts, with not a marble column or portico in sight, this sparkling structure spreads out in tiers of glassed-in walkways, offices, and courtrooms, and also shops, restaurants, a small cinema, and a skating-rink. Pools cascade from one level to another among indoor and outdoor gardens of flowering shrubs and rose bushes, Japanese maples, orange trees, and a miniature pine forest. An intriguing pattern of stairways and ramps collectively dubbed “stramps” — very popular with rollerskaters and rollerbladers — runs across the plazas from corner to corner, attracting large crowds during city celebrations.
Robson Square also provides a home for Vancouver Art Gallery, in the old courthouse (a proper Neoclassical temple renovated by Erickson). The star feature of this collection of Canadian artists is the outstanding work of Emily Carr (1871–1945). “Crazy Old Millie,” as she was known locally — “Klee Wyck” or the “Laughing One” to her Kwakiutl Indian friends — was a popular eccentric in Victoria, where she kept a boarding house and wheeled a pet monkey around in a baby carriage. Years of painting among the native peoples and studying with French Post-Impressionists produced a unique style of vigorous, expressive landscapes and totemic themes achieved with great sweeps and swirls of bold color. Look for the lush, dramatic Big Raven (1928) and Forest, British Columbia (1932), in which the trees have the sculptural quality of totem poles.
The section of Robson Street between Burrard and Bute streets is known as Robsonstrasse. Now it has lost its distinctively German character to become a cosmopolitan restaurant row offering Vietnamese, Japanese, Scandinavian, Italian, and French cuisine. Fresh seafood is a great attraction.
East of Robson Square, the Granville Mall pedestrian shopping zone takes you down to the Harbour Centre and the waterfront. From the foot of Granville Street, take a bargain cruise on the commuter Seabus, which crosses Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver, 12 minutes each way. Besides the “fish-eye view” of the city and harbor, you get a close-up of the grand Canada Place, jutting out into the harbor like an ocean liner, with a hint of the port’s 19th-century beginnings in its white simulated sails. Originally the national pavilion at Expo ’86, it is now the B.C. Convention Centre. If you don’t have a taste for the down-and-out life of Skid Row on Hastings Street, make your way east to the brighter colors of Chinatown along Pender Street. Canada’s largest Chinese community, made up of the descendants of immigrants who worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway, is much in evidence in the fruit and vegetable markets, fish-stalls, and boutiques of silks and satins, bamboo and lacquer wares from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. Look for the shops of traditional spices and medicines, where reindeer horn and deer’s tail-tips are said to perk up even the weariest husband. Barbecued pork and poultry glisten in the windows of the dozens of restaurants, and tourists are drawn in by the garish street décor — even the telephone booths have pagoda-style roofs.
Away from the throngs, the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden, at the corner of Carrall and Pender streets, offers a rare moment of peace. This microcosm of nature reflecting the Taoist philosophy of yin and yang was landscaped by artists brought in from Suzhou, the great center of classical Chinese gardens. A pavilion with a diversity of glazed roof tiles, carved woodwork, and lattice windows overlooks a subtly patterned pebblestone courtyard and the miniature landscape. Light is balanced by shadow, and rugged limestone rocks (yang) are chosen for their pitted and convoluted surface, balancing the smooth surface of calm pools and quiet streams (yin). Shrubs symbolize human virtues: pine, bamboo, and winter-blooming plum represent strength, grace, and the renewal of life. 
Duly renewed, then, make your way towards the harbor and railyards, to Gastown (between Water and Hastings), the resuscitated red-brick, cobbled-street district of Vancouver’s beginnings. This huckster’s paradise of boutiques, souvenir shops, bars, and restaurants is frankly commercial in its polished quaintness, but with a certain corny charm. At the west end of Water Street is the world’s first (and probably only) monumental steam-powered clock, signaling the hours with a resounding whistle. On Maple Street, a no less handsome statue of Gassy Jack, a distinctly derelict-looking riverboat captain known to his mother as John Deighton, stands on a whisky barrel symbolizing the drinks he served to lumbermen, persuading them to build the town in 1867.
Escape the crowds by heading east along the waterfront to the Campbell Avenue Docks, where you can watch the ocean-going fishermen unloading their haul or join them for a hearty meal in the local canteen. And if the Robson Square Courthouse whetted your appetite for the architecture of Arthur Erickson, continue this side trip out along Hastings Street towards Burnaby Mountain (actually only 400 m/1,200 ft high) and the striking campus of Simon Fraser University. The spectacular focus of student activity is the great mall of the Academic Quadrangle. Note the delicate play of light and shadow among stairways and terraces under the mall’s truss-supported glass roof. On the way back downtown, swing over to the B.C. Place, a vast concrete oval-domed sports stadium where the B.C. Lions play their football indoors. 
Stanley Park
Covering a magnificent peninsula proudly dominating English Bay, this is undoubtedly one of North America’s finest city parks. Its forest of majestic Douglas firs, cedars, and Sitka spruce remind us it was once a government reserve providing mast and spar timbers for the Royal Navy. At the turn of the century, the town leased it as a park, named after Lord Stanley, Canada’s governor general. His bronze statue is close to the southern entrance. Turn east off Georgia Street to take the 9-km (51/2-mile) drive looping the park. More bracing is the Sea Wall Promenade, where you can walk, jog, or ride a bicycle (available for rent at the park entrance). Passing the immaculate green playing field of Brockton Oval, you may spot a cricket game, reminding you this is British Columbia. A splendid group of Haida and Kwakiutl totem poles nearby illustrate the province’s other important cultural influence. On your way to Brockton Point, listen for the 9 o’clock gun, a cannon that fires at 9pm, originally to warn fishermen of the fishing curfew.
Turning west, you’ll pass on the seaward side a bronze statue oddly named Girl in a Wet Suit, a version of Copenhagen’s mermaid designed not to shock. Stop off at Prospect Point for a good view of oil tankers and grain cargo ships bound for Japan, China, or Russia. A totem pole marks the site where Captain Vancouver met with members of the Squamish tribe.
At the Aquarium the star attractions are the dolphin show and the beluga whales, closely followed by polar bears. Equally fantastic are wolf-eels with crab-cracking jaws. Bears and monkeys seem to be having much less fun at the nearby zoo. You can walk marked trails to picnic at the pretty freshwater Beaver Lake, from which the beavers were “deported” after creating havoc with the water system. The park’s popular sandy beaches run along the west shore of the peninsula.
English Bay
Get away from the city center with an excursion out to Point Grey. You can relax on the pleasant beaches; Wreck Beach is reserved for nudists. The grounds of the University of British Columbia, one of the most beautiful college campuses in North America, are nearby; the terraced Sedgwick Library and the Faculty Club rose garden are two notable gems set against a superb sea and mountain backdrop. The university’s pride and joy is the great Museum of Anthropology, out on Marine Drive at Point Grey. Arthur Erickson designed this noble glass and concrete-beam structure in 1972 as an explicit homage to the post-and-beam longhouses of the Northwest Coast Indians. Gracing the lawns are a magnificent group of totem poles and two cedarwood houses of the Haida Indians, built in the 1930s and faithful to a centuries-old technique and form.
Inside the museum, alongside the artifacts of other Pacific civilizations, the rich culture of the coastal tribes — Haida, Kwakiutl, Salish, Tlingit, and Tsimshian — is beautifully displayed and illuminated in a space where the roof-glass seems to open the halls to the heavens. Compare the sturdy cedarwood canoes, built to negotiate the Pacific’s coastal waters, with the lighter birchbark craft used by Eastern Woodlands Indians for the rivers of Ontario and Québec.
Many of the sculptures you see were incorporated into the structure of a house as posts and crossbeams. One Kwakiutl giant accompanied by two slaves, emphasizing the homeowner’s power and prestige, originally supported a massive central roof beam. Others represent the tribes’ totemic animals, such as the bear, protecting a human being in his bosom. Prehistoric stone carvings show the continuity of totemic styles. Some smaller figures, in soft black argillite stone, were turned out by Haida craftsmen specifically for 19th-century European tourists who found themselves “caricatured” in the carvings.
Notice the huge wooden feast dishes, big as bathtubs, for dispensing food at the great “potlatch” ceremonies at which the tribes proclaimed their greatness by the munificence of their hospitality (see page 35). An important part of the collection is devoted to gold, silver, and copper jewelry, and wooden masks and ceremonial rattles. Many of these are kept in Galleries 6 and 7, but don’t hurry past just because they look like the museum’s store rooms. That’s what they are, but this so-called visible storage system is a major innovation to make permanently available the museum’s thousands of art objects. Here you’re encouraged to make your own discoveries, compare the work of different cultures around the world, and just admire the sheer wealth of allegedly “primitive” creativity.
Just to the south of the museum, the Nitobe Memorial Gardens are a fine example of classical Japanese landscaping. Stone-lanterned paths lead you across hump-bridged ponds to a traditional teahouse set among Japanese maples and azaleas. The nearby Asian Centre, holds interesting exhibitions of the art, costumes, and photographs from China, Japan, India, Korea, and Indonesia.
Return to the city center on Point Grey Road and stop off near Jericho Beach to visit the Old Hastings Mill Store (1575 Alma Road). Carried here lock, stock, and barrel from downtown in the 1930s, this is the town’s oldest surviving building — a post office, general store, and the only remnant from the original Gastown to have escaped the 1886 fire. It has been restored as a museum for turn-of-the-century paraphernalia. Closest that wholesome Vancouvrites get to being Bohemian, the Kitsilano neighborhood here is popular with students, young and old.
In the little Vanier Park by the Burrard Bridge, you’ll find two interesting little museums and the MacMillan Planetarium. The Centennial Museum is devoted to local history and anthropology. The Maritime Museum traces the history of the Pacific port. Its showpiece is the Saint-Roch. This proud ship of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sailed clear around the North American continent via the Panama Canal and the Arctic Ocean, to plot a definitive Northwest Passage and hunt German U-boats on the way.
The area where English Bay narrows into False Creek epitomizes Vancouver’s taste for the good life. The once miserable wasteland of run-down warehouses, lumber-mills, factories, and railyards has been reclaimed not only for the upbeat commercial enterprises that are now a familiar feature of any Canadian city with a waterfront, but also as a handsome residential neighborhood. Under the Granville Bridge, Granville Island (really a triangular peninsula of landfill) is a cheerful collection of markets, cafés, galleries, boutiques, and theaters. Children love it not just for the toys in the Kids Only Market but also for the water playground around the fire hydrants and tons of rubber tires.
False Creek has given its name to a charming neighborhood of architecturally inventive houses set around garden-courtyards and terraces. The east end of the “creek” was the site of Expo ’86, perpetuated by the giant geodesic dome of Expo Centre, now operating as an exhibition hall and movie theatre.
Squamish Highway
The drive over Lions Gate Bridge to Vancouver’s North Shore suburbs along Marine Drive and the Upper Levels Highway (Route 99) makes a gentle introduction to your exploration of the Pacific coast and interior. With a view of the ocean from a setting of tall Douglas firs and red cedars among boulders, and the occasional swift mountain stream, the elegant or rustic houses enjoy a civilized microcosm of the classical B.C. landscape.
Route 99 turns north at Horseshoe Bay (landing area for the Vancouver Island ferry) to become the Squamish Highway for a spectacular 100-km (60-mile) drive up to Whistler Mountain. The Coastal Mountains come right down to the water’s edge of the narrow Howe Sound, some forming a little archipelago in the sea.
Stop off at Shannon Falls, a short walk away from the road on an easy gravel path over footbridges into the forest. You can picnic at the bottom of the cliff over which the water cascades. Famous for its August log-rolling contests, the town of Squamish makes a useful base for hiking tours into Garibaldi Provincial Park. The winter sports resort of Whistler offers excellent summer facilities, too: bicycles, kayak and river-rafting or more sedate swimming, golf, and tennis. Take the ski-lift for views across the Coastal Mountains or stroll around Lost Lake — good trout-fishing — but beware of a pretty yellow flower known as skunk cabbage that smells like its name when you pick it.
As a delightful alternative to driving, you can travel from Vancouver to Squamish aboard the Royal Hudson 2860 steam train, a regular old puffer giving you a close-up view of mountain and forest. The round trip takes 6 hours, including a 2-hour stopover in Squamish allowing for a walk over to Shannon Falls. You also have the option of making one leg of the trip by sea (30 minutes longer). Board the morning train in North Vancouver at the bottom of Pember Street and return from Squamish on the MV Britannia ferry — or vice versa, starting from Vancouver’s Harbor Ferry dock at the bottom of Denman Street.
Victoria
Probably the most genteel city in all of North America, this town is of another age, another world. In its sheltered spot on the southeast tip of Vancouver Island, flowers seem to be growing everywhere. Geraniums in baskets hanging from five-bulb lamp-posts in the city’s shopping streets; hydrangeas and roses in the lovingly tended gardens of the residential neighborhoods; shrubs and more exotic blooms in the city’s parks and conservatories.
In the month of February, while the rest of Canada is still huddled around log fires and radiators, even just across the Strait of Georgia in Vancouver, the people of Victoria are out in their parks and gardens for the annual flower-count. Yes, they count every blossom in town, and the figure regularly tops the 5 million mark. For Victoria is blessed with an exceptionally mild climate, with enough rain to water the flowers, and an annual average (they count everything in this town) of 2,183 hours of sun to give them their brilliant colors. Even the air in Victoria is sweet and gentle.
Not surprisingly in a town attracting an affluent retirement community, the port is more pleasure- than work-oriented, filling its harbors with cruise liners and yachts, ferries and seaplanes. Parliament reminds the citizenry of the town’s venerable past and more serious role as B.C.’s legislative capital. Not that it detracts from the hallowed ritual of tea-time, act of obeisance to a more legendary than real Britain. Good for a chuckle, but if it highlights Victoria’s resistance to the rest of the planet’s hustle and bustle, so much the better.
The town is small enough to get around on foot, but there are also horse-drawn carriages and red double-decker buses from London. The toy-like quality of Victoria is emphasized in its most imposing building, the Parliament. Built in 1897, it was certainly erected by someone with a playful sense of what might best evoke merry old England. There’s a bit of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in the massive central dome topped, for want of a saint, by a gilded statue of Captain George Vancouver. The neo-Romanesque arched entrance recalls the British capital’s Natural Science Museum, and the smaller-domed turrets suggest something between an Englishman’s castle and his county council. The whole fairytale effect is enhanced at night when every contour of the Parliament is outlined by thousands of light bulbs.
Inside, you can visit the debating chamber, unmistakably modeled on the House of Commons. In the great dome’s interior rotunda, painter George Southwell’s murals illustrate the four virtues that “made” British Columbia: Courage, as shown by George Vancouver confronting the Spanish at Nootka Sound in 1792; Spirit of Enterprise, with James Douglas establishing Fort Victoria for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1842; Work, by those who had to build the Fort; and Justice, meted out to the unruly mob engaged in the 1858 gold rush.
Reasonably enough, the Parliament grounds include a bronze statue of Queen Victoria. It was she who chose the name of British Columbia — over New Caledonia, New Hanover, New Cornwall, or New Georgia. There is also a cenotaph, which is the focus of the annual mid-September Battle of Britain Parade. You can easily get the impression that this town is only nominally in Canada.
Immediately east of the Parliament is the newly housed Provincial Museum, devoted to B.C.’s fauna, flora, and a first-rate collection of Indian art. In front of the museum stands the 62-bell Netherlands Carillon Tower, a gift of Dutch-Canadians and tallest bell-tower in the country.
Farther east is Thunderbird Park, home of the city’s most important collection of Indian carvings — Tsimshian and Haida totem poles, Salish sculpture of their chieftains, and a reconstructed Kwakiutl longhouse. The thunderbird, a mythical creature whose eyes flashed the lightning and whose beating wings rumbled the thunder, figures in many of the carvings in the park. At the sculpture workshop, you can see native peoples still practicing the ancient skills but with modern tools. Most of the park’s woodcarvings date from the last half of the 19th century, but are restored and replaced when weather or worms get the better of them.
At the corner of Dallas Road and Douglas Street is Kilometer 0 of the 7,800-km (4,680-mile) Trans-Canada Highway (ending up, with the aid of a ferry or two, in St. John’s, Newfoundland). It is here that the flowers and greenery of Victoria begin their most delightful assault, in Beacon Hill Park, an expanse of gently rolling flower-bordered lawns and groves of cedar and oak sloping down to the Pacific Ocean. Look for the 38-m (114-ft) totem pole carved by Chief Mungo Martin and believed to be the tallest in existence.
At the northern end of Beacon Hill is the Crystal Gardens conservatory. You can have tea on the Upper Terrace overlooking tropical plants, exotic birds and repulsive reptiles. They are kept at a safe distance for the palm court tea dances.
The Empress Hotel, farther north, is so renowned for its elegant servings of tea that it schedules three separate afternoon sittings everyday, and you’re advised to make a reservation if you want to participate. The Empress was built in 1905 to serve passengers ferried across from the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific and is the archetypal grand old railway hotel. There’s a good replica of Victoria looking decidedly unamused in the Royal London Wax Museum (in the C.P.R. Steamship Terminal, near the Inner Harbour). The Royal British Columbia Museum houses prehistoric and native exhibits.
The Inner Harbour is a pleasant place for loitering among the yachts and seaplanes. The harbor’s Pacific Undersea Gardens is an unusually well-presented natural aquarium that you view from beneath the sea. Besides the exquisite tropical specimens, there’s a perfectly horrid giant octopus.
The Maritime Museum in the old courthouse on Bastion Square contains some fine models and navigational paraphernalia of the merchant ships of yore — whalers, steamers, and old Hudson’s Bay paddle-wheelers. The star attraction is the original Tilikum, a 13-m (40-ft) dugout canoe equipped with three sails to take Captain J. C. Voss in 1901 on a crazy three-year voyage round the world. He sailed from Victoria via Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Azores to land up in the English seaside town of Margate.
The Emily Carr Gallery (1107 Wharf Street) presents changing exhibitions of Victoria’s best-known painter (see page 150), along with memorabilia and a short film about her life and work. The town’s Art Gallery (Wilspencer Place, south of Fort Street) has works of the English Impressionist Walter Sickert, French watercolorist Eugène Boudin, and Dutch landscape-painter of the 17th century, Adriaen van de Velde.
Drive 22 km (13 miles) north of town to a floral fairyland, Butchart Gardens. Robert Pim Butchart made a fortune out of Portland cement at the turn of the century and found himself stuck with an exhausted limestone quarry. His wife suggested turning it into a garden. The result is a bewilderingly beautiful phantasmagoria of fountains, lakes, rock gardens, trees, and flowers: the Sunken Garden, with symmetrical Trees of Life and rockery of gentian, saxifrage, and Lebanon candytuft; the Rose Garden, at its best in July, boasting 150 varieties of hybrid tea and floribunda roses; the Japanese Gardens, with scarlet azaleas, Himalayan blue poppies, weeping larch, and pond with a couple of cranes to bring you good luck; and the dreamy Italian Garden, cypresses singing a song of Tuscany around a cruciform basin filled with water lilies, where once was Mr. and Mrs. Butchart’s tennis court. The gardens also put on firework displays and open-air theater.
Vancouver Island
Some 460 km (276 miles) long and averaging 80 km (48 miles) wide, the mountainous island is covered by the largest stand of lumber in the world, a boon to the province’s most important industry, but also a magnet for nature-lovers. They hike or flyfish for trout in the interior and then make for the superb sandy beaches along the island’s west coast, to picnic or troll for Pacific salmon. For several thousand years, it has been a favored spot for Indian hunters and fishermen living around the sheltered coves and fjords that penetrate deep inland. Today, about 7,000 Salish and Wakash Indians still live on the island, well away from the towns and tourist resorts.
Coming from Vancouver, board the car ferry at Horseshoe Bay for Nanaimo and head north on Highway 19. Turn west at Parksville to cross the island on Highway 4. This takes you through some of the province’s finest forestland: the red cedar of canoes, totem poles and longhouses; stately Douglas fir, mainstay of white man’s bridges, boats, houses, and flagstaffs; and the good old Sitka spruce Christmas tree.
About 20 km (12 miles) from Parksville, look for a signpost to Little Qualicum Falls. The well-marked walk loops around the upper falls tumbling into a ravine, then follows the river rapids along to the lower falls that crash into another rocky gorge. You can extend the hike along the river for a picnic or bracing swim at Cameron Lake.
Highway 4 follows the lake shore to Cathedral Grove, a formidable stand of Douglas firs in MacMillan Provincial Park, donated to the public by a paper manufacturer as a gesture for government permission to exploit less accessible parts of the forest. Many of the firs, up to 76 m (230 ft) high, are more than 300 years old, the most ancient dating back to the 12th century. Excellent explanatory panels trace the growth of these majestic trees. Off the beaten track, you’ll steep yourself in the atmosphere of a truly primeval forest.
Stock up on picnic supplies in the town of Port Alberni before driving on past Kennedy Lake and down to Pacific Rim National Park. Its sandy beaches are a delight, the powerful ocean-breakers being particularly admired by champion surfers. At the coast, Highway 4 turns north along one of the best resort areas, the self-explanatory Long Beach, 12 km (7 miles) of fine sand and first-class fishing waters. Hotels here provide you with cooking facilities for whatever fish you — or a generous neighbor — might catch. The boardwalk that rambles along Wickaninnish Bay will take you in and out of the coastal pine forest. Florencia Bay is a good bathing beach, while South Bay is the mecca for collectors of “worry stones.” These exquisite green, aubergine, or (most prized of all) jet black pebbles are gathered from hidden nooks and crannies, sorted for size, shape, and smoothness of texture until the ideal stone is located, a highly subjective appraisal. All others are discarded and the collector can be seen caressing the pebble, rubbing all worries away. From Comber’s Beach, you can spot sea lions basking out on the rocks, with not a worry in the world.
For a change of pace, the sleepy town of Tofino is a community of ecologists, painters, and poets pursuing a style of life remote in every sense from the B.C. mainstream. Take a look at the Indian art gallery and performances at the experimental theater.
On the northeast coast of the island, the coastal Cape Scott Province Park offers a variety of outdoor challenges and is extremely popular with scuba divers, kayakers, and canoeists. Departing from Port Hardy, B.C. Ferries organizes a daytime or overnight cruise through the spectacular Inside Passage, between the densely forested island coast and the nordic fjords of the B.C. mainland. 
Fraser and Thompson Canyons
This stark mountain landscape of pine forest progressively thinning out to more arid, craggy canyons above the fast-flowing river is the pioneer country that “made” British Columbia. Driving east from Vancouver on the Trans-Canada Highway and following the Fraser River north to its tributary, the Thompson, you are backtracking along the great exploration route traced by intrepid fur traders from the prairies to the Pacific. It’s also the route unerringly followed by millions of Pacific salmon between the ocean and their spawning grounds far inland. And, against all the odds of the terrain, it’s the route the railways chose to carry the riches of lumber, mining — and the first tourists — across the continent.
One of the most impressive sights on your trip will be the rivalry of the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railways in action: endless trains of freight wagons, pulled and pushed often by two engines at either end for the tougher stretches, snake through the canyons on opposite banks of the river.
Turn north at Hope to Yale, an old fort of the Hudson’s Bay Company, terminus of its stern-wheelers unable to negotiate the rapids upriver — at low water you can still see their ring tie-ups on the river bank. A little museum documents how this sleepy village of a few hundred inhabitants was once a gold rush boomtown and the major construction depot for the C.P.R.
The strands of B.C.’s destiny come together where the Fraser Canyon narrows at the torrential rapids of Hell’s Gate. For thousands of years, this point in the river’s descent to the ocean was the local native peoples’ favored fishing spot for the salmon swimming to their spawning grounds. It was here in 1808 that they helped Nor’Wester fur trader Simon Fraser with his canoe past the rapids, over a swaying ropeway of vines strung along the canyon wall, enabling him to follow to the ocean the river that bears his name. In 1914, the C.N.R. blocked the salmon’s passage with rock-blasts through the canyon for the railway. The consequent 90 percent reduction of the annual sockeye salmon catch was remedied only 30 years later when multimillion-dollar steel-and-concrete channels were built for the fish. The native peoples are back again in areas like this, leaning far out over precarious rocky ledges to pluck with dip nets just a tiny amount of salmon, compared with the millions caught by the commercial fisheries at the Fraser estuary. Take the cable car across the gorge for a close-up view of the rapids. For a taste of what the fuss is all about, try a grilled salmon lunch at the restaurant by the cable-car terminal.
The Thompson River joins the Fraser at Lytton. Before turning east on the Trans-Canada Highway to follow the Thompson, take a look (just north of town on Highway 12) at the dramatic effect of the confluence mixing the lime of the tributary with the clearer mountain waters of the Fraser. The drier Thompson valley soon takes on a more rugged aspect than the Fraser, with the sagebrush and lizards of a semi-desert, in places as beautifully desolate as a moonscape. The similarity with America’s southwest is reinforced by the ranches around Kamloops Lake.
If you’re here in October, you may see the spectacular salmon run, when the waters turn scarlet with thousands of sockeye. Take the turn-off on the Trans-Canada at Squilax Bridge to the junction of the Adams River and Shuswap Lake. On the Thompson River, summer visitors can try the bumpy thrills of the sockeye experience for themselves with some whitewater river rafting organized out of Vancouver — details from the city tourist information office.
Okanagan Valley
Before heading east to the Rocky Mountains, turn south on Highway 97 to the lovely Okanagan resort country (about four hours east of Vancouver) for golf, tennis, swimming, hiking, camping, and fishing amid vineyards, orchards, and dozens of trout lakes. The Okanagan River itself widens into an elongated lake with excellent sandy beaches, sailing, and other water sports facilities centered around Kelowna.
Across the lake at Westbank, among other orchard towns, you pay for what you pick: apricots, peaches, cherries, plums, pears, and apples. At the southern end of the lake, the resort town of Penticton stages a Peach Festival at the end of July.
Sunny Okanagan Valley is one of only two wine-growing areas in Canada (the other being in Niagara Peninsula, Ontario). Ten wineries propose tastings and sales of their not undrinkable dry whites and dry reds along with some more refined wines from the nobler European varieties: Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, and Riesling. Among the wineries you can visit are Calona and Uniacke Estate in Kelowna, Mission Hill in Westbank and Gray Monk at Okanagan Centre.
Hottest spot in the region, down by the American border, is Osoyoos, nestling in the mountains around a good swimming lake and pocket-sized but honest-to-goodness desert complete with cactus, sagebrush, rattlesnakes, coyotes, and horned toads.
THE ROCKIES AND PRAIRIES
In this region, the great Canadian outdoors really comes into its own. The national parks of the Rocky Mountains provide unrivaled opportunities for exhilarating contacts with a wilderness where you can really escape from your fellow man: camping and hiking through the forests; fishing in the myriad lakes and rivers; canoeing and whitewater rafting in the mountain torrents. And skiing, downhill and cross-country, has been greatly enhanced by the ultra-modern facilities installed for Calgary’s 1988 Winter Olympics.
Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba form the Prairie Provinces, sharing the same rugged climate. The full meaning of Canada’s “wide open spaces” becomes instantly apparent here, in the vast stretches of wheat field reaching to the horizon. The eye is attracted not by some craggy obstacle but by the play of a sudden wind sweeping across the plain. The sky is spectacular, offering magnificent dawns and sunsets. Play the farmers’ game of watching the weather come and go.
Stop in the provincial capitals of Edmonton, Regina, and Winnipeg for a glimpse of the region’s history and culture. Monuments and museums show how the buffalo-hunting Métis, the descendants of Indians and French fur traders, struggled in vain against Anglo farmers from Ontario, themselves subsequently relayed by waves of Eastern European immigrants brought in to exploit the grain wealth of the prairies. One sidetrip in Manitoba touches on another Canadian adventure, up to Churchill on Hudson Bay, the center of the great fur trading company’s northern activities. A bonus in autumn is the rare “southern” appearance of polar bears.
Rocky Mountains
If there’s one region for which you should reserve most of your superlatives and stock up on rolls of film, this is it. For all visitors to western Canada, whether they be sturdy hikers, skiers, and mountaineers, or more easygoing loafers seeking to rest their tired bones in a hot springs spa or bask beside a cool, sparkling lake, the sprawling national parks of the Rocky Mountains are an undisputed imperative.
Straddling the border of British Columbia and Alberta, the North American continent’s grandest range of mountains stretches from the Yukon Territory down to the Mexican frontier. For the tourist, the abundance of superbly administered national parks — Mount Revelstoke, Glacier, Kootenay, Yoho, Banff, and Jasper — give the Canadian Rockies an edge over their U.S. counterpart, to which thousands of visitors from south of the border will testify. (Some of the national parks charge a nominal entrance fee — check at the park entrance, as you may be stopped by park-rangers later on. You can buy a one-day permit, or an annual permit that admits the vehicle and occupants to all national parks.)
The stark drama of the mountain landscapes derives from the fact that, in geological terms, the Rockies were born “yesterday” and have not had the time to settle into more stable forms. Waves of sedimentary rock lifted by vast thrust faults less than 60 million years ago have created a variety of striking silhouettes: the battlements of a medieval fortress, sawteeth, or single pyramids like the Swiss Matterhorn. The highest peak in the Canadian Rockies is Mount Robson, 4,320 m (12,972 ft), just inside B.C.
Mount Revelstoke
The highway through the Monashee and Selkirk mountains to Mount Revelstoke National Park follows the Eagle River and the route of the C.P.R. on the crucial stretch that enabled the railway to break through the Rockies. At Craigellachie, right beside the road, about 25 km (15 miles) east of Shuswap Lake, a granite monolith marks the spot where the eastern and western sections linked up to form Canada’s first transcontinental railway. At 9:22am on November 7, 1885, surrounded by top-hatted dignitaries and grimy overalled laborers, C.P.R. boss Donald Smith tucked in his flowing white beard and hammered home the famous Last Spike — after misjudging his first swing and bending a first spike over double.
Leave the Trans-Canada 11/2 km (1 mile) east of Revelstoke town to drive the winding Summit Road up Mount Revelstoke, 2,120 m (6,370 ft), the only mountain in Canada that you can “climb” by car. This is the cozy way to watch the park’s landscape change from dense lowland forest, through alpine meadows dotted with wild flowers, to the bleak tundra of the high country. From the top you look out over the Columbia and Illecillewaet river valleys and back to the Monashee Mountains. There are no campgrounds inside the park, but if you’re planning to tent overnight along the 65 km (39 miles) of clearly marked hiking-trails, check in with the park administration office in downtown Revelstoke (P.O. Box 350, Revelstoke, B.C. VOE250; tel. [phone]). This is the place to get your detailed maps and fishing permit. In the creeks and lakes, you’ll find an abundance of trout — rainbow, brook, brown, cut-throat, and red-spotted Dolly Varden — as well as whitefish, char, and bass. Nature-lovers may spot elk, moose, and mountain goat, bird-watchers look for grey jay, blue grouse, and golden eagle, while everyone should watch out for black bear.
The Trans-Canada continues through the jagged mountains of Glacier National Park, which counts over 400 glaciers within its boundaries. Rogers’ Pass was named after the major who found this corridor in 1882, thus enabling the C.P.R. to cut through the avalanche-prone Selkirk Mountains. It was also the toughest obstacle to clear for completion of the Trans-Canada Highway in 1962.
Yoho National Park
From the railway depot and sawmill town of Golden, the highway turns east to one of the prettiest of B.C.’s national parks, in the mountains and quiet lakes around the Yoho and Kicking Horse rivers. Buy your food supplies at the parkside town of Field and cut back to the signposted Emerald Lake turnoff. Just inside the woods is a pleasant picnic area beside the “natural bridge,” a massive slab of rock through which the swift waters of the Kicking Horse River have forced a channel. A salt-lick just past the bridge often attracts moose at dawn and dusk. Drive on up to Emerald Lake, a place of sheer magical peace, mirroring the mountains in its perfectly still green waters. With only one secluded hotel on its shores, the pearshaped lake’s tranquillity is less troubled by noisy tour groups than some of the more popular Rocky Mountain resorts. The lake path makes a delightful two-hour ramble through woodland, giving you a good chance of spotting some of the park’s small wildlife, notably some very chubby brown porcupine and an occasional beaver.
Back on the Trans-Canada, the turn-off 6 km (31/2 miles) after Field takes you past the park information center to a steep winding route through the pine forests of the Yoho Valley. Signposted on the right, 13 km (8 miles) into the valley is a short walk to the foot of the spectacular Takakkaw Falls. Takakkaw is an Indian word for “magnificent,” a fair description of the waters spilling out of the outflow of the Daly Glacier. Unlike many waterfalls, this one is at its most spectacular on the hottest summer afternoons, when the glacier ice melts. For a panoramic view of the glacier, take the Highline Trail 1 km (1/2 mile) south of the falls, starting out from the Whiskey Jack Hostel.
On the way back, stop south of the confluence of the Yoho and Kicking Horse rivers for a view of the Spiral Tunnels. Watch trains entering and reappearing from the upper of two tunnels bored into the mountain to form a figure 8. The lower spiral is visible from the Trans-Canada Highway. This engineering feat was necessary to overcome the steep gradient of the approach to Kicking Horse Pass. At the park’s eastern exit, you’ll see where geologist James Hector, member of an 1858 expedition mapping the major passes through the Rockies, was kicked senseless by a pack horse — thus the name of the pass. From Field, you can ride through the tunnels to Lake Louise.
Lake Louise
The fairytale setting of this blue, blue lake with its monumental railway hotel, Château Lake Louise, has made it the mecca of thousands of sightseers every year. The village (3 km/2 miles east) is very much a tourist-trap, but the lake (named after a daughter of Queen Victoria) and its surroundings retain their magic. From the hotel terrace, before breakfast and the first crowds, look out onto the pine trees and snowy peaks of Fairview mountain to the south and the Beehive to the north, with the dazzling white Victoria glacier producing startling reflections on the shimmering surface of the lake. Give the mob the slip by walking along clearly marked paths to the far end of the lake, with some pleasant teahouses on the way. The path continues to the Plain of Six Glaciers, requiring more stamina.
Take the mountain road 14 km (81/2 miles) south to Moraine Lake — nice drive, wonderful all-day hike — to view the sawtooth skyline of the Valley of the Ten Peaks and the exhilarating climax of the lake’s clear turquoise waters.
For a view of the whole area, take the cable car from Lake Louise up Mount Whitehorn.
Banff National Park
The first and most famous of Canada’s national parks began, as so many things in this country, with the railways. When the C.P.R. reached Banff in 1883, the Rockies were suddenly opened up to public access, and the government decided, two years later, to preserve the region’s beauty by declaring Banff a national park.
After three railway workers discovered hot sulfur springs bubbling from the earth, their bosses built one of their grandest castle-hotels, the Banff Springs, a monument to be visited even if you’re not staying there. The turreted edifice set down in the Bow River Valley has something of the fairytale castles of Ludwig of Bavaria. Take a canoe out on the river. If you’re feeling less energetic, take the waters at the Cave and Basin Springs, 3 km (2 miles) west of the hotel, or the Upper Hot Springs, a short drive south. The springs are 29°C (85°F) in winter, rising to 42°C (108°F) in summer. The eight-minute cable car ride from Upper Hot Springs up Sulfur Mountain (2,500 m/7,500 ft) will give you a panoramic view of the mountains around the Bow Valley.
One of many fine excursions is the drive along Bow Valley Parkway (Highway 1A), then a hike along the marked trail beside the rapids to the lower and upper waterfalls in Johnston Canyon. Back on the Trans-Canada Highway towards Lake Louise, look to the east for the crenellated silhouette of Castle Mountain, 3,000 m (9,000 ft) high.
Icefields Parkway
This 233-km (140-mile) drive on Highway 93, up the spine of the mountain range from Lake Louise to Jasper, gives a rich sense of the Rockies’ varied beauties —  glaciers, waterfalls, lakes, and canyons. Take a full day so that you have time to explore some of the sights on foot. Stop first at the Crowfoot Glacier, where you can see the foot’s two remaining “toes,” the third having broken away. The mass of ice facing you is 55 m (165 ft) thick. At Bow Summit, leave the Parkway at the signpost to the viewpoint overlooking the lovely Peyto Lake, a deep turquoise at the height of summer. If you have time, stop at Kilometer 119 on the Parkway, to hike up the winding path to Parker’s Ridge (2,185 m/6,560 ft) above pretty alpine meadows overlooking the Saskatchewan Glacier, the beginning of the great North Saskatchewan River that ends up in Hudson Bay.
Inside Jasper National Park, put on good rubber or crepesoled shoes to walk out onto the ice of Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Icefield. You can also venture onto the ice sheet in a snowmobile. Note the rock debris or rubble (moraine in the language of glaciologists) in front of the glacier showing that the Athabasca is retreating — a hundred years ago it reached to the other side of the Parkway. At the Parkway’s Kilometer 200 mark, take Highway 93A to Athabasca Falls. A comfortable boardwalk leads you on an informative nature walk right up to where the mighty river plunges over the narrow gorge.
The old fur trading post of Jasper is now a refreshingly peaceful resort town with a grand park lodge and fine facilities for rafting, canoeing, camping and other mountain sports. Take the Jasper Tramway ride up Whistlers Mountain for a view of the Rockies’ highest peak, Mount Robson. One of the most attractive excursions is the drive along Maligne Canyon. Stop off to look down into the sheer limestone gorge at the roiling waters, sudden cascades, and tranquil pools. At the end of the canyon is Maligne Lake, where the great attraction is a boat cruise around the picturesque Spirit Island.
Alberta
This province of ranches and oil derricks likes to cultivate the image of Canada’s Wild West. If its politics are often conservative (opponents compare some of the leaders with the province’s cherished collection of dinosaurs) they are of the adventurous brand favoring Calgary’s rodeos and the commercial extravaganza of Edmonton’s celebrated mammoth shopping mall.
With the discovery of huge oil fields after World War II, Alberta’s economy boomed, the population exploded, and confidence soared. The enthusiasm is dampened occasionally by downturns in world oil prices, but the atmosphere remains decidedly cheerful.
Alberta is very conscious of its geology. Alternating 600 to 200 million years ago between dry land and sea, the region developed a plant and animal life that decayed to form the oil, coal, and natural gas at the base of the province’s modern prosperity. Subsequent floods and earthquakes left the parched Badlands of the Red Deer River Valley as a protective crust, preserving the skeletons of the dinosaurs. They were discovered by surveyors looking for coal seams.
Calgary
In this part of the world, in past eras, gold rushes created cities out of a wasteland overnight and just as quickly returned them to dust. Soaring Middle East oil prices seemed to do the same thing for Calgary in the 1970s, but the shining downtown skyscrapers that shot up then do not look as if they are about to crumble. Not that Calgary was a wasteland when the post-World War II oil boom began, but it was little more than a cow town, better known for bronco-busting rodeos than business acumen. Population more than doubled from 280,000 in 1961 to 590,000 20 years later, chasing hard behind the provincial capital — and arch-rival — Edmonton. The town now boasts a population of 944,000. 
Hotshot bankers have moved in to handle the new wealth, polishing up but not eclipsing the frontier image. While hand-tooled cowboy boots and Stetson hats are still popular, the business suits between the two are increasingly sophisticated, even Italian in cut, leaving the string ties and blue jeans for the Stampede.
The ten days of the Calgary Stampede in the first half of July are, by any standards, anthropological or purely hedonistic, a phenomenon to be experienced. Cowboy hyperbole demands that it be known as the “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth,” a title dating back to its beginnings in 1912. The Stampede was originally conceived to show all the techniques and excitement of rounding up cattle on the prairies. Today, at Stampede Park, it does indeed stage agricultural and garden exhibitions, displays of Indian crafts and dancing, and all the sideshows of a country fair. But after the grand opening parade of baton-twirling majorettes, cowboys, costumed Indians, champion steers, and smiling stars of the chamber of commerce, the great attraction remains the rodeo. Bareback riding and bronco-busting, bull riding and steer-wrestling, calf-roping, and Indian buffalo riding culminate in marvelous chuck-wagon races. The Rangeland Derby, as it is known, races four-horse wagons like those used to bring food out to the cowboy on the range during roundup time. The chuck-wagon races are said to have originated when the last crew back in town had to buy all the drinks — now the prize pot totals over $200,000. Just as much fun as the official events are the square dancing in the streets, firework displays, barbecue dinners, and flapjack breakfasts.
Spend a more sober moment in the fascinating Glenbow Museum (130 Ninth Avenue S.E.). Beautifully arranged exhibits of furniture, costumes, utensils, and weapons give a vivid picture of Alberta life, from the pioneers’ log-cabin homesteads to the modern artifacts of oil-drillers, railway-builders, and miners. One evocative exhibit of the Great Depression of the 1930s is a farm girl’s party dress bejeweled with scores of safety pins arranged in patterns. The life of Ojibwa and Cree Indians is displayed in tepees, magnificent buffalo robes, and beaded buckskin, dance masks, and snowshoes.
The shops and offices of the downtown skyscrapers are linked by a network of all-weather bridges and subterranean galleries. One of the main shopping centers is the four-block Stephen Avenue Mall. For a view of the town’s steel and glass urban canyons and the Rocky Mountains looming on the western horizon, take the elevator to the observation deck of the 207-m (623-ft) Calgary Tower. Immediately below it is a revolving restaurant.
Winter sports enthusiasts will appreciate the new facilities created for the 1988 Olympics. The Saddledome out at Stampede Park is equipped for ice hockey and figure skating. A speed-skating rink has been installed in the Olympic Oval on the University of Calgary campus, which gains attractive new student residences from the Athletes’ Village. On Bowfort Road 15 minutes west of town, the Canada Olympic Park has built two ski-jumps and the country’s first combined bobsled and luge run. Most popular with the tourists are the new downhill runs at the Nakiska ski area on Mount Allan, 80 km (48 miles) southwest on Highway 40, and the cross-country trails at Canmore (west on the Trans-Canada Highway) at the foot of Mount Rundle near the entrance to Banff National Park.
Drumheller
The area around this old coalmining town is famous for the prehistoric fossils and remarkably complete remains of dinosaurs whose stamping grounds were the Badlands of the Red Deer River Valley. The 130-km (78-mile) drive northeast of Calgary on Highway 9 takes you through wheat-growing country where you may see the farming communities of Hutterites, an austere religious sect originally from Slovakia, often persecuted for their pacifism. The women wear traditional dirndl costumes with headscarf and apron, while their husbands, dressed all in black with broad-rimmed hats, cultivate the heavy beards of Old Testament prophets.
Drumheller’s Dinosaur Trail places fossils and life-size models of the beasts in their original habitat — though you have to imagine a luxuriant humid jungle in place of the present-day arid desert. Looping 48 km (29 miles) round the Red Deer River, the trail starts out at Drumheller’s fossil museum, 335 First Street, devoted mainly to the region’s geology. But for a most exciting confrontation with the prehistoric world of dinosaurs, make for the new Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology on the Midland provincial park’s North Dinosaur Trail. This beautifully organized museum, drawing on the most modern audiovisual techniques, is named after Joseph Tyrrell, the geologist who made the first discovery of Alberta’s 65-million-year-old dinosaurs while surveying coal seams along the Red Deer River in 1884. Drawing on some of the finest of the 200 creatures unearthed in the area, the Tyrrell museum recreates jungle environments for superbly reconstructed skeletons and models, including Tyrrell’s Albertosaurus, the awesome Tyrannosaurus rex, measuring 15 m (45 ft) long and 6 m (19 ft) tall in its cotton socks, and the “tiny” but most lovable of all, a duck-billed Lambeosaurus, just 3 m (10 ft) tall, followed by her baby.
Edmonton
You can see the source of the provincial capital’s wealth as you drive in from the airport. On the southern outskirts of town on Highway 2 are the derricks and “grasshopper” pumps that have characterized Edmonton since the oil strike at the great well of Leduc Number 1 in 1947. But the town has created another treasure trove in the astounding West Edmonton Mall (Stony Plain Road, Highway 16), a shopping center to end all shopping centers, complete with a waterpark and attracting as many as 140,000 customers on a busy day, 40 per cent of them from the United States. 
If you want a view of the whole city and the North Saskatchewan River on your way home, stop off at Vista 33, the observation level of the telephone building.
Saskatchewan
Though revenues from oil, uranium, coal, and natural gas now approach agricultural income, Saskatchewan is still known as “Canada’s bread basket.” During the Depression, it was the country’s poorest province, close to starvation. But that all changed with the timely rise of local boy John Diefenbaker as the first federal Prime Minister from Saskatchewan. Farmers won’t ever forget the deals he got for their high-grade bread wheat in Russia and China. You can see the monuments right across the Prairies — huge cathedral-like grain elevators.
Regina
The queen Latinized in the provincial capital’s name is, of course, Victoria. The city’s decorum would please her. It’s been cleaned up considerably since the first settlers arrived in the 1880s and found the banks of the Wascana Creek littered with hundreds of buffalo bones. Indian hunters used to dry their buffalo meat and stretch the hides by the creek, and left the bones in a heap. The town was known as Pile of Bones until they were ground up for fertilizer.
Today, you’ll find the buffalo, along with other regional wildlife, prehistoric and present-day, in the Museum of Natural History, on Albert Street. The museum is south of the city center in the very pretty Wascana Park, one of the few places in southern Saskatchewan where you’ll see any trees. The creek has been dammed to form a lake, with a bird sanctuary out on Willow Island. Also in the park is the provincial Legislative Building, with an interesting portrait gallery of Indian chiefs on the ground floor. On Lakeview Drive is the Diefenbaker Homestead, brought here from near Saskatoon to give a vivid insight into the simple country life led by Saskatchewan’s most famous son before he went off to Ottawa “to show them Yanks and Ruskies a thing or two.” 
Headquarters of the famous Mounties in the 1880s until moved to Ottawa, Regina keeps the Royal Canadian Mounted Police College as a major training center (north of the airport at the end of 11th Avenue). Visit the barracks, crime laboratories, and Centennial Museum, which traces Mountie history from the first clashes with gold-rush panhandlers to wartime reconnaissance and latter-day counter-espionage. The old mess hall is now the “Little Chapel on the Square,” where the stained-glass windows portray not saints but Mounties, notably a reveille bugler and guard in mourning. At Government House (Dewdney Avenue, corner of Pasqua Street), you can see dramatizations of Louis Riel’s treason trial.
Manitoba
Flat the province may be, but it offers an astonishingly rich ethnic diversity in its rural and urban populations. In addition to Anglo-Saxon and French stock brought here by the fur trade, late 19th-century immigration campaigns have given Manitoba thriving communities of Ukrainian, German, Jewish, Polish, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, and even Icelandic origin, with more recent arrivals from Asia and the Philippines.
Winnipeg
Of the province’s population, well over half (681,000) lives in its capital. In addition to the inevitable government bureaucracy, the town has a stalwart business community and proud cultural life, especially in modern art, ballet, and classical music. Manitoba’s many ethnic cultures provide the basis for its Folklorama festival, which every summer attracts some 40 pavilions featuring a variety of national cuisines, folklore, craftwork, and costumes.
The town’s artistic and commercial worlds have joined forces in recent years to preserve the old business district’s handsome turn-of-the-century architecture as a lively shopping and restaurant neighborhood, north of Notre-Dame Avenue between Princess Street and Main Street. The Old Market Square Warehouse District, as it’s now known, boasts many fine office buildings and warehouses inspired by the great Chicago School, including the Canadian West’s first skyscraper, the 1903 Royal Tower (504 Main). On Old Market Square itself, on summer weekends, you’ll find a colorful farmer’s market alongside stalls of antique bric-a-brac and craftware.
Its vital stake in the grain and commodities market gives Winnipeg a strong financial as well as architectural affinity with Chicago, as you can see on a visit to the trading floor of the Commodity Exchange, open to the public at 360 Main (5th floor). This is just one of the town’s many modern skyscrapers clustered around the commercial hub of Portage and Main, which has the reputation of being the windiest spot in Canada.
In the splendid Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature (190 Rupert Avenue), prehistoric and present-day animals are presented in beautifully recreated environments of Arctic wastelands, tundra, woodland, and waterfalls, complete with bird sounds, eerie wolf howls, or the terrifying roar of a forest fire. The province’s ethnic groups are shown in traditional costume and old homesteads; special emphasis is given to Manitoba’s Indians and a Métis buffalo hunt. Be sure to walk around the reconstructed decks of the 17th-century Nonsuch ketch that pioneered Hudson Bay’s involvement in the fur trade.
The museum adjoins the Centennial Center, home of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Manitoba Opera Association and Royal Winnipeg Ballet. If you’re not around for the ballet performances there from October to May, look out for the summer Ballet in the Park shows in Assiniboine Park, west of town off the Trans-Canada Highway.
The Winnipeg Art Gallery, in a strikingly designed angular structure at 300 Memorial Boulevard, has an interesting permanent collection of modern Canadian and American artists, Inuit sculpture, and usually first-rate seasonal exhibitions.
The old French-speaking community of St-Boniface, now a Winnipeg suburb, is on the east side of the Red River. Its Avenue Taché boasts the city’s oldest building, the 1846 convent of the Grey Nuns. It’s now the parish museum, devoted in part to the life of Louis Riel. Next door, you’ll find his simple grave in the cemetery of St-Boniface basilica, rebuilt behind its white stone façade after a recent fire.
Children enjoy the 2-hour ride in the four wooden coaches and caboose of the Prairie Dog Central steam train, from St. James Station to and from Grosse Isle, 25 km (15 miles) northwest of town. If you feel like a day at the beach, drive northeast on Highway 59 to Lake Winnipeg, where the most convenient swimming is at Grand Beach.
Churchill
This historic port offers a unique opportunity (with simple but comfortable hotel accommodations) to visit Hudson Bay. You can see beluga whales in summer, polar bears in the autumn, and, if you’re around at the spring or autumn equinox, the “northern lights” of the aurora borealis. The easiest way in is by plane, but if you want to see at ground level the Manitoba lakes and plains that fur traders crossed in the days of old, take the VIA train from Winnipeg for a seven-day excursion.
Even at the height of summer, take warm clothes for the brisk evenings. The little town has a true frontier atmosphere to it. The Hudson’s Bay Company established a trading post here in 1717, and its store on the main street is still the place to get camping and hiking gear — or long underwear if a sudden blizzard blows up. Inuit craft shops offer not souvenir junk but genuine native handwork, and leather and fur goods that do not infringe protected-species laws. The Eskimo Museum gives a good insight into Inuit life and art around Hudson Bay.
Wildlife tours around the bay and across the otherwise inaccessible hinterland are organized in giant-wheeled or half-track tundra buggies (half- and full-day excursions or overnight camping trips). Several boat tours explore the bay for close-up sightings of beluga whale and cruise over to the ruins of Fort Prince of Wales on a promontory at the mouth of the Churchill River. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s massive stone fortress surrendered to the French navigator La Pérouse in 1782, without firing a single shot.
If you want to explore on your own, rent a car and drive round the harbor and its monumental grain elevators on the way to Cape Merry for a good view of the fort, especially at sunset. Take your binoculars to follow the beluga whales that swim with the summer tide in and out of the river estuary.
THE NORTH
Every country needs its mythic place, and Canada’s is the fabled North, the icy “wasteland” in which the country and the world like to cloak the national image. But there’s a fascinating reality “North of 60,” as locals call the territories above the 60° latitude, ignored until recently by everybody but the Inuit and other native people who live there, plus a few explorers and miners. Even today, if they ever staged a football game between the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, the whole population could be comfortably seated in the stadium.
But more and more adventurers from “the outside” head for the Yukon’s rugged mountains or the Northwest Territories’ eerily beautiful Arctic wastes (the northernmost point is just 830 km/500 miles from the Pole). In the old Klondike boomtowns, people find a whiff of romance from the great gold rush of 1897. Lovers of the outdoors track the last free-roaming bison herds or fly in for the challenge of fishing the trout and grayling in Great Slave and Great Bear lakes. 
Access by road takes several days, but there are plenty of airlines serving the Whitehorse; Yellowknife; and Frobisher Bay (for access, via Pangnirtung, to the Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island).
The Yukon
The Klondike gold rush did more than fire the western world’s imagination with scores of novels, epic poems, and films — it immediately opened up a whole vast territory with such mundane services as railways, roads, telephones, electricity, and hot and cold running water. In a subarctic land of soaring mountains and elongated glacial lakes beside the great Yukon River, today’s tourists can thank yesterday’s prospectors for using part of their paydirt for some essential creature comforts. Close to the original action and still providing the most vivid testimony to the Klondike days, the boomtown of Dawson City yielded in 1951 to the transportation and communications center of Whitehorse as territorial capital.
Whitehorse
The town grew up as the terminus where prospectors transferred from the Skagway train to the Yukon River steamboats and is now the junction of the Alaska and Klondike highways.
Though a thoroughly modern town with a population of 23,000, the Yukon capital is proud of its Old Log Church on Elliot Street and some three-story log cabins it calls “wooden skyscrapers.” One of them houses the MacBride Museum (First Avenue), with a good collection of gold rush memorabilia and exhibits of Yukon wildlife.
You can visit a sternwheel riverboat, the S.S. Klondike, moored at the end of Second Avenue. Upriver, 3 km (2 miles) south of town, take a 2-hour cruise through Miles Canyon on the M.V. Schwatka. At Black Mike’s Gold Mine, a 30-km (18-mile) drive south of Whitehorse, you can try your own hand at panning for gold.
Dawson City
A day’s drive from Whitehorse along the Klondike Highway, the old boomtown counts scarcely 1,000 inhabitants today, but the national parks system has done a nice tongue-in-cheek job of reconstructing the monuments of its heyday. The history of Dawson City is further celebrated by a couple of annual events. This is the place to be in the week of August 17, Discovery Day, for the Klondike River raft-races, costumed street-parades, music, and dancing. If you miss it, look out for the Outhouse-On-Wheels race at the beginning of September.
One of the town’s major year-round attractions is Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Gambling Hall, an old-fashioned (and legal) casino, where red-gartered dancing girls kick it up to a honky-tonk piano. The gaudy Palace Grand Theatre is famous for its vaudeville, Gaslight Follies.
St. Paul’s Church shows a good film on the Klondike days, while Dawson City Museum gives you all the inside information about gold-mining, displaying prospectors’ tools and paraphernalia. Behind the museum is the log cabin of Robert Service, the diggers’ bard celebrated for The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. He himself avoided the tough life of the gold-miner for a cozy job at the local bank. And next door is the home of Jack London, who made more money from his novels of the wild North than from the stake he worked on at nearby Henderson Creek. Both literary shrines hold readings from the masters’ works.
Kluane National Park
About 150 km (90 miles) west of Whitehorse on the Alaska Highway, the entrance to this wilderness reserve is at Haines Junction. The park’s St. Elias Mountain Range offers a challenge to climbers, including the highest peak in Canada, Mount Logan. You’ll find moose, timber wolves, black bear, and grizzlies here.
For safety’s sake, check in at the park reception center and get maps and information on the hiking trails covering 240 km (144 miles) of challenging terrain. The vast Kluane icefield system is made up of some 2,000 glaciers, and you can hike right to the rim of the spectacular Kaskawulsh Glacier from Kluane Lake on the eastern edge of the park. Bird-watchers spot eagles, falcons, and hawks. Fishermen come for the trout, grayling, and lake salmon.
Northwest Territories
If you feel drawn by a rendezvous with the Midnight Sun, make for these immense lands covering one-third of Canada’s total surface, where, compared to the icy expanses inside the Arctic Circle, the tundra passes for lush meadowland. The summer, when temperatures climb to a comfortable 21°C (70°F) in Mackenzie District, offers the blessed privilege of a dazzling explosion of wild flowers. Beluga whales come out to play around Baffin Island. In autumn, the magical northern lights of the aurora borealis are at their most brilliant.
Yellowknife
On the north shore of Great Slave Lake, the territorial capital is a modern industrial gold-mining center serving as a convenient base from which campers and fishermen explore the interior. On June 21, when the sun just won’t go down, the town proposes a golfer’s (and caddy’s) midsummer night’s dream with the Midnight Golf Tournament. Even non-golfers pour in for the all-night parties. All through the summer, there is open-air theater in Petitot Park,
To gain an insight into the lives of Arctic-dwelling Inuit and Dene Indians of the Mackenzie Valley, visit Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre. In the shops, the native craftwork is of particularly high (and authentic) quality, and reasonably priced.
Head over to the Bush Pilot’s Monument for a good view of the whole town and the lake. Bush pilots will be your best help for getting out to some of the country’s most-touted trout-fishing on Great Bear Lake or other less accessible lakes
Wood Buffalo National Park
Straddling the Alberta border, this park presents a unique opportunity to see herds of the rare shaggy humpbacked wood buffalo, 5,000 at last count, in its natural habitat. You also have a chance of spotting the endangered whooping crane. Park headquarters at Fort Smith (fly in from Yellowknife or Edmonton) organize camping field trips and photo-safaris.
Auyuittuq National Park
Flights from Montréal or Toronto (2,200 km/1,320 miles) take you up to Baffin Island and the world’s only national park inside the Arctic Circle. Change planes at Frobisher Bay for the park entrance at Pangnirtung. In its lovely mountain setting on the Cumberland Sound, this peaceful Inuit town is a good place to buy Inuit carvings — and to start your viewing of harbor seals and the elusive beluga whales. Inside Auyuittuq, (explored by dog-sled or on foot,) you’ll find plenty of opportunities to see the Arctic’s summer flora and fauna, most amazing among them the beautiful white fox and formidable polar bears. Up on the park’s Penny Highlands, ponder the thought that the ice on the Penny Ice Cap is a left-over from the last Ice Age that ended about 20,000 years ago.