Canada

Canada is the country that quietly does everything well and rarely gets the credit. It is the second largest on earth, most of it empty in a way that urban humans have forgotten is possible, and the cities have learned to live gracefully beside all that wilderness. I have crossed it by plane far more than by road, and I have come to treat it as five or six separate trips that happen to share a flag and a love of doughnuts.

The Rockies

Everyone starts in the Rockies, and they should. Banff is a small mountain town with a very large backdrop, and Lake Louise is the colour that nothing prepares you for: a glacial turquoise that comes from fine rock flour suspended in the meltwater, so vivid it looks like a rendering error in an otherwise realistic simulation. Be there at sunrise, before the car park fills and the canoes go out.

The best drive in the country runs north from there. The Icefields Parkway covers roughly 230 kilometres between Lake Louise and Jasper, and the glaciers come down to meet the road. At the Columbia Icefield you can walk onto the Athabasca Glacier on a guided trip and stand on ice that fell as snow centuries ago. Bring a layer more than you think you need. The wind off the ice is cold even in July.

On the coast, Vancouver is a glass city pressed between mountains and ocean, best explored by bike along the seawall around Stanley Park. Cross to Vancouver Island and the rainforest meets the Pacific at Tofino, where storm-watching in winter is a genuine local sport, or fly to Haida Gwaii, the misty archipelago off the north coast, where the totem poles and the old-growth forest feel like the edge of the map.

French Canada

Montréal and Québec are where Canada turns European, in a way that never feels like pastiche. Montréal is a bilingual city of festivals, bagels baked in wood-fired ovens, and a restaurant scene that punches well above its size. The summer calendar is relentless in the best possible way, from the jazz festival in late June to street fairs that close whole neighbourhoods to cars.

Three hours downriver, Québec City is the only walled city north of Mexico, with a lower town of stone houses and a Château Frontenac that looks like it was ordered from a fairy tale. Walk the ramparts at dusk, eat a tourtière, and do not rush it. October is the month for the Laurentians and the Eastern Townships, where the maples go red in a way that rivals New England with half the crowds.

Toronto sits in between and is its own thing: one of the great food cities, built by immigrants who made diversity a culinary resource rather than a talking point. Take the day trip to Niagara Falls, which is as loud and wet as promised, and then head on.

The Maritimes

The Atlantic provinces are a completely different register: fishing villages perched on granite coasts, lobster pulled from the sea that morning, and fog rolling in like something out of a novel you read too young. Peggy’s Cove is the famous one, a lighthouse on bare, wave-polished granite about an hour from Halifax, and it is worth reaching before the tour buses do.

At the Bay of Fundy, the tides rise and fall by up to sixteen metres, among the highest on earth, and the same beach is a seabed at low tide and underwater six hours later. Check the tide tables, walk the ocean floor, and watch the water come back in.

The Cabot Trail is a loop of about three hundred kilometres around the northern tip of Cape Breton Island, where highlands plunge straight into the Atlantic and fiddle music pours out of kitchen parties and village halls on summer nights. Budget two days and stop at every lookout, because they are all different.

The far north

The wilderness is what stays with you. Fly to Yellowknife for the northern lights, which turn up on clear nights in autumn and winter with a casualness that borders on showing off. Or go to Churchill, on Hudson Bay, reached only by plane or train. In October and November, polar bears gather along the shore waiting for the sea ice to form, and you watch them from a tundra vehicle with a guide who has done this for decades. In July and August it is the beluga whales instead, and you can paddle among them.

The Yukon, northern British Columbia and Labrador reward anyone willing to drive for hours without seeing another vehicle. The boreal forest runs to the horizon in every direction, and the quiet is physical.

When to go: June through September for the Rockies and most outdoor activities. October for fall colour in Ontario and Québec, and for polar bears at Churchill. December through April is ski season in British Columbia and Alberta, and the best window for Yellowknife’s aurora is roughly late August through March. Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island are at their best from late June to early October.

What most guides get wrong: They underestimate the distances. Canada is enormous, and flying between regions is often the only practical option. Do not attempt to drive from Banff to the Maritimes unless you have two weeks and a deep affection for the Trans-Canada Highway. Pick a region, or two at most, and explore it properly. A week in the Rockies and a week in the Maritimes will teach you more about the country than a month on a checklist.

Photography: Pexels contributors.