Canada self drive travel guide

Canada encourages you to park up. After all, drive 20 minutes down the road from Niagara Falls and you’re in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where you’ll want to ditch the hatchback ASAP to sample the ice wine. For all its big landscapes, Canada puts great pride in the small-batch and bespoke.

“I’ve been to Canada a dozen times,” says Simon. “The preconception is that it’s Americanised and that there are a lot of chains. Yes, there are – but when you get out into the remote places the amount of stuff that is locally produced is amazing.”

There’s something lovely about driving all these big distances in outsized scenery to hone in on something small – a pear grown in a bottle and made into unusual eau-de-vie fruit brandy in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia; fresh lobster pulled out of the sea at a corner shop in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; or the fresh salmon burger truck whilst waiting for the car ferry in BC. It’s easy to support local businesses when their output is so special.

Locally led activities make road trips a pleasure in Canada. A million people might look up and see the granite slabs around Lake Louise, but there will just be a handful of you looking for bears with a Métis guide in Jasper National Park. On Manitoulin Island, Ontario, you can search for medicinal plants with the Anishinaabe people. On this, the largest lake island in the world, 40 percent of the population are from First Nations communities.

Canada’s precolonial history has been undervalued, and its Indigenous peoples oppressed. By visiting exhibits at places such as Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology, and meeting Indigenous guides on your trip, you can start to understand millennia of Indigenous peoples’ histories.

Got kids in tow? Go west. The sights come thick and fast between Banff, Jasper, Whistler, Vancouver and Vancouver Island in Western Canada – great for staving off any boredom on a family road trip.

Catherine Roberts, writer at Responsible Travel, spent time living in British Columbia: “The variety of landscapes is amazing,” she says, “and – in the west especially – can change pretty quickly as you’re driving through.”

You don’t have to drive for big distances every day on this side of Canada, and show-stopping scenery breaks up the road travel. Once kids get a whiff of adventure – whether that’s a hunt for the best cheesecake in Banff or for otters on Alta Creek in Whistler – they’ll be on the scent for the rest of the holiday.

Purpose-built luxury tourist trains link Vancouver with the Rockies. Trains take you from the coast up into the mountains on a choice of routes, and the scenery along the way is so pretty that the train doesn’t run overnight – you’ll alight in the evenings at a hotel instead so you don’t miss a single view. In the day, its glass-domed coaches ensure that the mountains don’t pass you by.

You can make the most of having a hire car by dropping yours off at the start of the train journey and picking up a new one at the end.