Extraordinary beauty, friendliness and thrills in Quebec, Canada

To call it ‘big’ then just doesn’t do it justice; ‘huge’ might and maybe ‘vast’ too, but if you really want to nail this flag to its post, try ‘leviathan’, because whatever else it might or might not be, Canada IS a monster of a country.

Meaning that unless you’re planning to limit your stay to one particular destination, such as a city or ski resort, you’re all but committing yourself to a road trip, and in Canada, road trips can be misleadingly longgggggggg.

So yes, while it may be important to breathe, more valuable still as a vital survival mechanism will be be your ability to choose and pack a handful of hum-along, sing-a-long CDs to ‘fuel’ your blacktop adventure (as well, incidentally, as a mobile phone that will actually work 200 miles into the freeway wilderness when your dashboard fuel display begins to flash ‘Empty’).

And, just a tip, if you are exploring Quebec you might care to add an English-French phrasebook too: it is a proudly French-speaking province, I myself experienced a few early hiccups translating ‘ouest’, ‘est’, ‘sud’ and ‘nord’ (West, East, South and North) at road junctions.

For this particular trip to Canada, my fifth in five years, I was hoping to experience an activity holiday and Quebec is, not surprisingly, a thrill-seekers’ Mecca; indeed, in an A to Z of high adrenaline pursuits, I think only harpooning and potholing were scrubbed from my itinerary.

Rock climbing, however, was not.

I have a fear of heights I can follow back to being a three-year-old on an overturned bucket, but fortunately for me, my instructor at the Station Touristique Duchesnay, a resort just 30 minutes drive out of Quebec city (see accommodation panel), was more like Mother Theresa in crampons.

True, by morning’s end I’d probably only scrambled, cried and whimpered my way to no more than 20 feet above ground, but to me it felt like I had conquered Mount Everest.

In fact, bolstered by this breakthrough of backbone, I also tried my hand paddle boarding (far more sedate) and later a spot of bear watching (the secret is to – a. hold your breath for up to 20 minutes and b. do it in a Sherman tank...).

The following morning, stiff and scratched from the trials of the cliff face, it was off, early (7am), for a white-water rafting ‘excursion’ – their words not mine – on the exquisite Jacques-Cartier river in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier (valcartier.com).

Typically the first 20 minutes of any such adventure is spent form filling, absolving the company and its employees of any responsibility for your death or disability, but once you get past this administrative blip, it’s plain sailing, albeit with an occasional capsize or two.

Of course, one of the downsides of this sort of activity, and especially so in Canada, is the fact that because its rivers are so achingly beautiful, you can often wish afterwards you’d taken time to see more of them from above the water line than beneath (be warned: getting tipped or flipped out your raft is almost de rigeur).

So you can imagine how grateful I was to spend the next 18 hours in in the centre of the Parc National de la Jacques Cartier, a genuine, 24-carat jewel of a jaw-dropping national park, named after a 16th century French explorer who claimed what is now Canada for France.

A word of caution though: if you are intending to visit there in the next month or so, DO TAKE THE NEXT TURN when instructed to do so.

Unbelievably, entrance to the park is across one of the biggest road-building sites I have ever seen.

Dust and giant earth movers compete to ‘frost’ your car in a fine mist of concrete and earth before spitting you out into a boreal forest of yellow birch, sugar maples, and black spruce that stretch, like some vast environmental eiderdown, for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Naturally, it’s stunning – even camp sites here are Kodak Moments – but the ever-present ‘whine’ of mosquitoes stop you from slipping into any kind transcendental fug (at one point I blinked and a whole generation of mozzies were winked out...) Fortunately, I managed to kayak out on to the river at dusk and for 60 minutes, free of conversation and fresh skin rashes, I stopped. Switched off. Disconnected. And, in this instance, quite literally went with the flow...

I’m not into group hugs or ‘ids’ or ‘finding me’, but for that brief hour, watching the landscape around me mirrored ever more exquisitely across the dark water around me, I understood EVERYTHING.

That night I went native, sleeping in a yurt in the grounds of the park.

For those unfamiliar with the sleeping arrangements of Mongolian, Siberian and Turkish nomads, Yurts resemble mini circus tents but without the trapeze.

How authentic mine was I have no idea, but it was novel and cute and more than comfortable.

Which is just as well since the next morning heralded another early start (6am) and a five hour drive to Tadoussac, a coastal resort set at the point where the Saguenay Fjord meets the St Lawrence River, where the local economy seems to derive entirely from offering whale-watching cruises.

I stayed at the Hotel Tadoussac (see Where to Stay panel), a plush and iconic landmark that featured in the 1984 Hollywood film Hotel New Hampshire, starring Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe (bizarrely, I wasn’t aware of this beforehand but wondered why I kept experiencing spells of deja vu).

When inquiring, rather sheepishly, if the hotel had ever featured in a movie, I was informed: “Bien sur Monsieur Smeeeeeth, c’etait ‘Hotel New...’ I felt quite proud.

And, yes, during a three-hour, wet and freezing vigil out on the St Lawrence , I did spot some whales.

In warmer weather, this would have been magical but, unable to feel my hands or feet by the time the beluagas put in an appearance, it was simply a case of survival tourism: “Yeah, seen one, done that, now let’s race back to port.”

* For anything Quebec-related, see bonjourquebec.co.uk