JOURNEY THROUGH CANADA

Go west across the Rocky Mountains from Calgary to Vancouver, winding through jaw-dropping scenery and encountering magnificent wildlife

Linking two sophisticated cities – Calgary and Vancouver – this 965 km journey completely justifies that overused word ‘spectacular’. Have your camera ready to capture the other-worldly landscapes, ancient First Nations sites, towering snow-slathered mountains and no-filter-required emerald lakes.

There’s also wildlife in abundance – everything from bears to orcas – delicious Chardonnay and the shimmering Pacific Ocean for a finishing line. If there’s a drawback, it’s scenic fatigue – the danger that your senses get blunted by the national parks’ relentlessly epic vistas on a grander scale than anything in Europe. A pretty nice problem to have.

The 10-day route chases the setting sun out of Calgary towards the west, but starts with a 90-minute drive to the east into South Alberta’s Badlands, where the grassy plains plummet into a maze of steep, multi-hued mesas (flat-topped hills) and winding canyons – home to the largest deposit of dinosaur bones on Earth. Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum displays some of the most complete dinosaur skeletons ever found.

Further south, at Writing-on-Stone Park, you enter an alien world sculpted by ice, water and wind, with vast forests of sandstone hoodoos (rock spires) and vertiginous cliffs – a canvas for the greatest collection of rock art on North America’s Great Plains.

Thousands of carvings and paintings, made mainly by the Blackfoot Nation over 3 000 years ago, depict warriors, bison, tipis and spirits.