Why a canoeing holiday in Canada with five strangers is the perfect escape from city life

When I was asked to fill in for a friend kayaking in Canada, I took one moment to imagine a paddle cutting through water and said yes. I didn’t know where I was going, or who I was going with, but a week later I was on a plane to Toronto. 

It turns out Dave, Duncan, Rob, Scott, Ian and I were heading for Algonquin Provincial Park, all of us city-based adventurers who spend more time eyeing up the wilderness on screen than off road. 

Along the highway north from Toronto you start to measure speed in trees per second not miles per hour. And even for someone who loves forests, it gets too much – but it’s a good preparation for a week canoeing and camping in the lakes.

Our aim: to leave technology behind and paddle about Algonquin on giant Kevlar Evergreen canoes via an experience called portage (from the French verb “to carry”). 

It’s lakes not rivers, there are no whitewater rapids, but it involves one unusual challenge. To get from one lake to the next you have to tip the huge canoes upside down and carry them on your shoulders. 

The canoes come with a specially fashioned wooden crossbar – think Bavarian milkmaid – and the portage is a one-man job. You’ll need a mate to hold the canoe tip up high as you edge backwards under it and the yoke falls across your shoulders – but then it’s up to you. Tighten your stomach muscles, and step up very (very) tentatively until you develop a pace. The effect is “man wearing ridiculously long hat with constipation”.

Up muddy slopes and along occasional decking, it was a challenge to the mind as much as the body. For those of us who toil at keyboards and screens, the half-mile walks from lake to lake, coupled with the immediate return for the camping equipment, offered a tiny glimpse of real-world work. My tent and kayak mate, comedian Dave Lewis, packed only flip-flops, shorts and a poncho like he was braving a festival in the Home Counties. 

Dave and I spent hours talking and laughing without ever really seeing each others’ faces. I was at the front of the two-man canoe, Dave was at the back. It’s certainly a good way to get to know someone. 

To the city dweller there is nothing here. There are no cash machines, phone chargers, taxis, televisions, iPads, bars or shops. No petrol, no alcohol, no radio, no noise. And yet there is everything. There’s peace and tranquillity. There’s thousands of years of natural history. There’s an industry that built the British Empire then disappeared. There are moose and bears and wolves (somewhere). And there’s a clutch of red trees amid the green that look like a jigsaw piece in the wrong puzzle. Coming across a small, clearly man-made weir, we climbed out on to a very small wharf.

“Where we are standing,” our guide Robin announced, “was once Canada’s busiest railway station. A fully loaded engine would leave every seven minutes; such was the rate of harvesting the logs.”

After defeating Napoleon at the start of the 19th century, the British needed to rebuild their fleet to allow them the sea power to build the empire. While fighting the French in what became Canada, they found the Algonquin Forest and declared it would provide timber for a thousand years. The huge white pine trees made perfect masts for ships and they set about inventing the modern logging industry. Within 40 years the forest was spent. And so they began to replant and would revisit every 40 years. 

What followed was the hard-bitten heyday of logging and lumberjacks. Young men driven by poverty to live two to a bunk in small hovels, sewn into their underwear until the sweat and toil rotted them off, working 18 hour days until the snow stopped them. Then starting up again after the ice thawed.

We started to notice the odd trace: an iron link nailed into a rock face on a fast waterway. A cleaned log lying half submerged or stuck by a waterfall. In Alberta, a smart diving company has begun recovering the lost logs, perfectly preserved in the cold waters, and supplying them to order for designers and architects.

I have canoed in the English Channel but it has none of the power that the forests of hemlock, balsam spruce, white birch, maple and white pine give Algonquin. When we paddled off from still lake to lake, down beaver streams and across huge bays with rock walls, it was the red jigsaw-piece trees that served as my marker, indicating there was just 40 minutes of paddling back to camp.

“Turn left at the rock,” we laughed. “And then up the inlet to the bank. Carry the canoe through another forest. Repeat.” 

We’d been paddling and carrying these huge, hefty canoes on our shoulders for three days. It quickly became a challenge not to believe that this was where we were supposed to be. Lying on our backs across a bench and yoke, staring up at the sky. Floating in all nature’s stillness. Watching the day turn to dusk. Knowing your life is doing the same. 

One night, I pushed the canoe off the stone beach and floated backwards towards the middle of the lake. There’s a fifth of the Earth’s fresh water in Canada, and at this point a paddle was steering me deeper into it. There were 38 minutes of daylight left, and that was enough time to drift off into the middle of nowhere. The sun was almost gone but there was still enough warmth to go out in a T-shirt and life-jacket. If you think all canoeing is whitewater and rage, think again. This is the stillest place I’ve been to on Earth. Out here on Pen Lake, Algonquin, you go at nature’s pace – and you’ll feel all the better for it.

After just three days’ away camping and paddling it felt like we’d been away for weeks. On shore, six guys who were strangers three days ago gathered by the fire. The atmosphere was boisterous and funny. Our worst case scenario assumption was that we would be savagely attacked by wolves, while going to the lavatory in the woods. American Werewolf in London has a generation to apologise to. 

The revenue around Algonquin nowadays is through tours like ours – Call of the Wild’s three-day Algonquin Park Canoe Trip. It’s a rare chance to encounter genuine stillness in the modern world. When our muscles had enough of paddling and portage we bumped back through the forests in Robin’s truck, past modern-day lumberjacks with their iron-jawed JCBs, and holed up in his Algonquin Eco-Lodge, complete with its own lake and waterfall-powered energy. 

As we sat on the edge of the lake, a moose walked slowly by on the far side. Robin showed us photographs of wolves he had encountered. Though we fared well on the water, this constant comparison with nature’s greatness made us feel irrelevant. As if to underline this, on our first night back under a roof, Dave looked up from the table with a carving knife and fork in the wrong hands. “Does anyone know how to carve a chicken?”

The essentials

A three-day Algonquin Park Canoe Trip with Call of the Wild (callofthewild.ca) costs CA$480/£280 per adult and CA$384 per child. The price includes all food, permits, equipment hire and the services of a guide.

Algonquin Eco-Lodge (algonquinecolodge.com) charges CA$140 per person per night, full-board.

British Airways (ba.com) flies from London to Toronto via Chicago with summer fares from £324 return.