I’ve been waiting since the nadir of the first Covid lockdown for a new instalment of the BBC’s addictive backpacking competition Race Across the World. The long-haul series, in which five teams of two people trek thousands of miles without the use of planes or phones, makes for such potent sofa-sightseeing that the 2020 series is still being tweeted about. Viewing numbers for the latest season have hit nearly five million per episode, up from an average of 2.6 million in the first series and 3.9 million in the second.
I’m devouring the weekly drip-feed of the third series, a coast-to-coast dash across Canada. My home and native land — habitat of black bears, cowboys and truck drivers called Randy — has all the wild allure you could want from a destination. Yet the second largest nation on Earth is still seen by many as an unavoidable flyover en route to the States. The place is desperately in need of a PR makeover.
After Covid, and still reeling from the impact of a 40 per cent drop in international arrivals, Canada is pushing a slower, more sustainable style of travel in an attempt to welcome visitors back, without trampling on its habitats and landscapes.
Viewers of the first episode of the new Race Across the World series in March won’t have missed the irony. Let loose on the forested paths of Stanley Park in Vancouver with the goal of travelling to the next checkpoint, on an island 700 miles up the Pacific coast, progress is positively glacial as the teams learn hard truths about the region’s public transport. Ferries run sporadically and coaches stop “in the middle of bumf*** nowhere”, Claudia says as her father, Kevin, hails their first of many taxis.
As the brothers Marc and Michael whip out a map of Canada — a square metre of paper for a country 3,500 miles wide — the longtime friends Tricia and Cathie trip up just trying to find their way out of the park.
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Occasionally the first-placed team watches a comfortable lead evaporate while stragglers filter onto the same twice-weekly boat. There simply are not enough Canadians to sustain robust public transport beyond the Toronto-Quebec corridor that hugs the US border, where the vast majority of Canada’s 38 million people live. And even there two teams end up on the same bus, then the same awkward lift, to the Quebec City checkpoint. This uncomfortable truth about the world’s ninth largest economy certainly adds to the tension of the race.
The river depths and mountain highs seem worth the effort nonetheless. Although I wish my favourite city, Vancouver, had received more attention as the cast raced out of town, I appreciate the winding drives northward, where bison, caribou and diving orcas become familiar sights.
Zainib and her husband, Mobeen, learn to ski on fresh powder in Whistler and charter a plane over Mount Logan, in the Yukon. Ladi and his daughter, Monique, carve through a grizzly sanctuary in a borrowed van spray-painted with octopus tentacles. Marc and Michael spot moose on a river raft guided by an elder of the Haida people. Even Edmonton, the Alberta capital that Tricia reckons will feel “like going to Cardiff”, emerges as the cosmopolitan delight I know it to be — a chill, arty alternative to corporate Calgary, in the same province.
And I’m not the only viewer seduced by lakeshores with endless blue horizons, such as those in Tobermory, northwest of my native Toronto. Viewers have responded in real time. “Tour operators and agents tell us they have seen an uplift in booking inquiries the day after the show is aired,” Maureen Riley of Destination Canada says. The UK-based tour operator Canadian Affair’s website traffic increased by as much as 30 per cent in the two hours immediately after the show.
“We especially noticed a higher level of inquiries for the Yukon and Churchill [in Manitoba] within a few days of those episodes being broadcast,” James Butler of Audley Travel says. “And these are areas we get relatively few inquiries for generally.”
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In Churchill the teams take to boats to navigate through ice floes and see beluga whales and polar bears. The tundra outpost is inaccessible by road, so they have to wait for the train from Winnipeg. “Twice a week and it still ain’t on time,” Ladi says. I wish that I could have forewarned them — I once took a VIA Rail train travelling across the Prairies and arrived 16 hours late.
Racing to the station, contestants ask directions from people with French accents who offer to drive them. The goodwill and low-stakes spontaneity of these local heroes rings true to me.
Otherwise the series resists lightweight clichés. Dawson City, a Yukon gold-rush town on the Klondike River, is probably most famous for a saloon where hardy drinkers down cocktails containing an old severed toe (long story), yet on the show it’s all sunny skies and blooming fireweed.
I expected umpteen trips to the doughnut shop (another Canadian trope). Instead Zainib and Mobeen earn back some travel cash frying green-onion cakes for a Chinese restaurant in Edmonton. In Winnipeg Ladi and Monique try their hands at baking butter tarts, a sugary cold-weather staple. Tricia and Cathie help to prepare poutine (cheese curds, chips and gravy) in a Montreal diner. These scenes reflect true Canadian cuisine more aptly than a maple-dip doughnut from Tim Hortons.
● Best things to do in Canada
● Top Canada itineraries
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By the sixth episode of the new series the teams (minus one pairing eliminated after arriving last in Banff, Alberta) have made unlikely friendships with Christian missionaries and Ukrainian refugees. In the Ontario city of Kenora, Zainib is moved to tears by a Cree woman who chanted an ancestral tune. Further south, on the Lake of the Woods, Claudia has been shown how to fish by a girl called Whisper. And apart from some trouble in rainy, pricey Montreal, they’re all bonding within their couples; friends, spouses, fathers and daughters weeping with emotion in each other’s arms. From a Canadian perspective they’re all winners.
Race Across the World is on BBC1 at 9pm on Wednesdays until May 10 and available on iPlayer
Top Canada itineraries for first-time visitors
1. Take a peek at the west
Start (and end) your trip where the five teams in the third series of Race Across the World were let loose — between the mountains and sea in Vancouver. Scott Dunn’s Bears, Ranch & Rockies self-drive tour includes three nights in Whistler, where Zainib and Mobeen learn to ski, and three nights in Banff, where Claudia and Kevin coo over Lake Louise.
Details Seventeen nights’ B&B from £4,400pp, including flights (scottdunn.com)
2. Through Canada’s heart
Drive through the fossil-rich badlands of Alberta, an otherworldly landscape curiously overlooked by four of the competing pairs. Wexas has a Prairies & Rockies tour taking in horse riding at a Saskatchewan ranch and two nights’ hiking between lakes and waterfalls in Jasper National Park.
Details Fourteen nights’ B&B from £2,345pp, including flights and some extra meals (wexas.com)
3. See Niagara
Traverse the big, busy province of Ontario, where Claudia catches her first fish and Tricia and Cathie learn to play ice hockey. Audley Travel’s Glorious Ontario self-drive tour includes two nights on Manitoulin Island, location of the fifth checkpoint in the show, and a chance to meet a First Nations community. From here it meanders through “cottage country” to Niagara and Toronto.
Details Fourteen nights’ B&B from £3,280pp, including flights (audleytravel.com)
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