Manitoba is distinguished principally by its parks ,
thousands of acres of wilderness, lake, river and forest that boast
wonderful scenery, great hikes and hundreds of kilometres of canoe
routes. One of the best is Riding Mountain National Park ,
250km northwest of Winnipeg, which derives its name from the fur
trappers who changed from canoe to horseback to travel across its
wooded highlands. On the southern edge of the park, the tourist
village of Wasagaming is a useful base for exploring the
surrounding countryside, which incorporates areas of deciduous and
boreal forest, lake and grassland. Manitoba's provincial
parks include the dramatic landscapes and difficult whitewater
canoe routes of the remote Atikaki Wilderness Park , the
lakeside marshes and forests of Hecla Park , and yet more
canoe routes in Duck Mountain Park , which is also noted for
its fishing.
Other than the parks and lakeshores, most of Manitoba's
significant attractions are concentrated in and around Winnipeg,
and many of the province's smaller villages and towns are not
really tourist destinations. The notable exceptions are
Brandon and Souris , both in the southwest corner of
the province, and remote Churchill , a wild outpost right up
north on the shores of Hudson Bay that's a great place for seeing
beluga whales and polar bears, but overrun by visitors and
documentary film crews. Elsewhere, Dauphin , Neepawa
and Minnedosa are three of the more agreeable prairie towns,
but almost all the other settlements are virtually
indistinguishable, despite the diverse backgrounds of the European
immigrants who cleared and settled Manitoba in the late nineteenth
century. Most of them were rapidly and almost entirely assimilated,
but the villages around Dauphin are still dominated by the onion
domes of the Ukrainians' Orthodox churches, and Gimli , on
the west side of Lake Winnipeg, has a pleasant museum tracing the
history of its Icelandic settlement.
There are reasonably regular bus services that run
between Manitoba's main settlements, and most of the village bus
stops are within relatively comfortable walking distance of at
least one hotel. However, nearly all of Manitoba's parks are
difficult to reach and impossible to tour by bus, with the
exception of Riding Mountain Park , where the service from
Winnipeg stops right in the centre of Wasagaming; weird Park
, where a bus passes through on the Trans-Canada on its way east;
and Spruce Woods Park , close to the bus routes from
Carberry and Brandon. VIA Rail operates just two train
services to and from Winnipeg, each running three times weekly: the
main east-west line connects Winnipeg with Toronto, Saskatoon,
Jasper and Vancouver, and a northern line runs to Churchill, via
The Pas, well beyond the reach of the road.