Passions: Canoeing in the Wilderness
Contributed by Jane Lucken
You want a stress-relieving break and are considering a spa vacation. They are great in principle, but often end up costing a lot more than you budgeted for and, if you’re like me, tend to involve more time spent on massages and pool-side lounging than giving your body the exercise it needs. If you are truly looking to escape your everyday life in the city and get healthy without too much effort, then I recommend a canoe trip in Algonquin Park.
A friend and I flew out from London last summer and found ourselves eating homemade muffins and fair trade coffee in a solar-powered lodge in a forest in Canada. The other guests were all participating in a training to become shamans and were wolfing down what was to be their last meal for a few days. We were pleased to see Chris, our guide, loading up food barrels with spices, organic vegetables and wild blueberries.
Paddling a canoe is pretty straight-forward. With two people to a canoe and a huge weight of camping equipment, Chris taught us the basic strokes to ensure the canoe went where we wanted it to. It took a while to get the rhythm but once we did, we could sit back and enjoy incredibly vast skies, blue water and forests of white pines.
Algonquin Park consists of 7,630 sq kilometers of forests, lakes and rivers, so it’s easy to get somewhere isolated. The lakes are connected by portages, rough tracks that you need to walk up and over. They don’t allow cars or powerboats, so you can just enjoy the sound of loons calling to one another across the lakes.
It’s not all silent mediation though. Much of the time is spent setting up camp, cooking supper before it gets dark and lugging gear over the portages. But this chance to focus single-mindedly on physical tasks created the distance from my everyday life that I was looking for.
Our first campsite was at the edge of massive rocks sloping into the water that stayed warm after the sun went down for comfortable stargazing. Like all the sites in the park, it was simply a natural clearing in the forest near the water, with some rocks for a campfire. Every site has a ‘toilet,’ i.e, box over a hole a short walk from the tents. Most days it was warm enough to swim and we could wash, abiding by the strict park rules, with a bucket and bio-degradable soap.
After a couple of days we’d got into the swing of things and Chris started to teach us more about living in the forest – how to track animals, brew pine needle tea, make rope out of bark, start a fire in the rain and read weather patterns. We made peace offerings to the squirrels who dropped nibbled pine cones on our tents to scare us away and luckily didn’t see any bears. We did see beavers and surprised a moose having an early morning stroll through the reeds.
I’d been worried about being away from civilization for seven days, but I could have gone on and contemplated spending a summer there. Reality snapped me out of that idea, but after a week of exercise and no make-up or hair-dryers, I returned with a clear head, clear skin, shiny hair and great upper arm definition – at a third of the price of a spa.
Facts for People Interested in a Canoe Trip:
- This sort of trip is suitable for anyone, singles, couples or families.
- You need to be reasonably fit, but the route can be customized to minimize the length of portages and make the trip less physically demanding.
- I booked my canoe trip through www.responsibletravel.com, a site which I recommend.
- The trip was run by Northern Edge Algonquin. I was called the ‘Seeking solitude’ trip, and it was priced at $875 (Canadian dollars).
- Getting there: Direct flights from London or New York into Toronto with a train or car trip up to the park.
- Check out https://www.northernedgealgonquin.com/ for more information.
