Whenever there’s a global survey to find the best places in the world to live, Canada always does well.
We’re told that no one in Canada
is ever robbed, butchered, stabbed, murdered or blown up by a doctor.
And I don’t doubt that all of this is true.
But by the same token no one
in Canada ever wins on the horses, or escapes from a knife fight with their
life,
or has an orgasm. It is Switzerland with wheat.
They try to tell us that it’s
a wilderness full of bears who’ll kill you if you run away or stand still
– I can never remember
which. But do you know how many people in the whole of the vastness of Canada
have been killed by bears in the past
two years?
It’s one. Honestly, more people than that are killed in Britain by their lawn mowers.
Anyway, Ottawa is the capital
and it’s really lovely. Lovely, lovely, lovely. More lovely than a pressed
wild flower in a copy
of Jane Eyre. If it were an animal it would be a fluffy rabbit. And no one
would ever eat it and it would never catch myxomatosis.
Strangely, however, despite
the complete lack of pressure, and the plentiful supply of cheap parking,
what the people of
Ottawa do come the weekend is drive half an hour to their cabins by the lake.
The lake is (gravelly voice here) really lovely.
Takes your breath away, roll your eyes, God-I-have-got-to-dive-in-that-right-now
gorgeous.
I spent some of my holiday there
this summer, and it was like lying in a nest of cotton wool, being hypnotised
by a tin of treacle.
I liked to swim in the morning, when the mist was rising, and in the afternoon
I’d go kayaking for hours round all the islands
and through the forests, soundlessly, apart from the paddles making eddies
in the water.
And the occasional satisfying crack as the beavers gnawed their way through
another pine.
At night I’d lie in bed listening
to the loons, those beautiful diving birds, and the gentle slop of the calm
waters lapping
against the untouched shoreline. And I couldn’t help thinking: what I need
to make this the best place on earth is a speedboat . . .
Happily, my host had such a
thing tucked away in his boathouse, and so for the next few days I never heard
a loon, or a beaver,
or the gentle slop of the wavelets. Instead it was wall to wall grrrrrrrrrrrr
from a 70 horsepower Johnson outboard, and the excited
shrieks from all the children who were being towed behind on big inflatable
rubber rings.
I don’t think the locals liked
it very much. Canadians reckon the speedboat sits on the scale of antisocial
behaviour between
heroin and rape, and they plainly thought that we might have been emissaries
from Satan. Certainly, they watched us in the
same way that an Amish village would watch a performance by Babyshambles.
But the fact of the matter is
this. God had done well with his side of the deal. The sky was blue, the sun
was warm and the
views were postcard-plus exceptional. But we had completed the picture with
two cubic feet of internal combustion.
We had hosed the Garden of Eden down with 600 gallons of adrenaline and turned
it into paradise.
It’s lovely, as I said, to drift
aimlessly through the forests on a canoe. But it’s so much better to be hurled
through them at
40mph on a big, bouncy and almost completely uncontrollable inner tube.
What’s more. Falling off a canoe
is a bloody nuisance, chiefly because you cannot get back on again. Whereas
falling
from a hurtling piece of plastic is just about the biggest laugh a man can
have. Especially if you go in upside down and
your shorts come off.
I would recommend a holiday
on a Canadian lake to anyone. But I’m afraid the recommendation comes with
a bit of a proviso.
To get from where the aeroplane lands to where the lake is you will need
to drive. And that means you will need to borrow a
car from a manufacturer’s press fleet.
But since you can’t do that,
I didn’t either. I hired one from a company called Thrifty. I looked for one
called Extravagant.
Or Expensive. But no such thing existed, so Thrifty it was.
The girl on the desk took my
details, and as is the way with all rental-car companies, began to enter
the full name of every
single company on the Footsie 100 into her computer. Finally, after about
a year, she looked up and cheerily announced that
no cars were available.
I explained that we had made
a reservation and that we had three small children who had just emerged from
seven hours in
the care of Air Canada - which is a bit like spending seven hours in a sensory
deprivation tank - and that we needed some wheels.
This made her smile: a big,
toothy, well-there’s-nothing-I-can-do about-it smile. Big mistake.
My children saw what was coming and ran for their lives.
My wife went the colour of a tomato and shrank into her own handbag.
When I’m faced with intransigence
at a car-rental desk, what I like to do is summon up some little nugget of
military history.
It’s never difficult. In Germany I tell them about Dresden, in France it’s
Agincourt, in Spain I wax lyrical about Drake, in Italy
I’m spoilt for choice, and in Argentina, where I’m going next year, I shall
be mentioning the Falklands.
In Canada I told the smiling
girl at the Thrifty desk all about the massive superiority of General Wolfe
over the pitiable
Marquis de Montcalm and explained that if she didn’t come up with a car -
right now - I’d visit the Plains of Abraham
on her desk.
It worked, and 10 minutes later
I was driving through Canada . . . in a Dodge Grand Caravan . . . from a company
called Thrifty.
As recipes go, this is right up there with a plate of pork sausages and strawberry
ice cream served in a puddle of tepid Greek urine.
According to the bumf, this
year’s Grand Caravan comes with the Swivel-N-Go system, which means the two
middle seats
rotate to face backwards, as well as the Stow-N-Go setup, which means you
can stow the back seats away
. . . and then, er, go somewhere else.
On top of this, it comes with
a stowable table, a MyGIG infotainment radio with AM/FM/CD/ DVD/MP3 as well
as a 20GB HDD,
touchscreen, a USB input, GPS navigation, second and third-row 8in video
screens, Sirius Satellite Backseat TV offering
Cartoon Network Mobile, Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, LED interior
lighting, a ParkView reversing camera,
a nine-speaker Infinity sound system with a 506 watt amplifier, 13 cupholders,
and sunshades for the second and third-row windows.
Sadly, my car appeared to have none of these things.
What it did have was a nasty
scrape along its flanks and a steering wheel that was not on straight. I think.
It’s hard to be sure, because where I pointed it seemed to have little or
no bearing on my direction of travel.
Small wonder that the Caravan’s sister car, the Chrysler Grand Voyager, did
so badly in the Euro NCAP safety tests.
Happily, however, if you do
crash you won’t be going very fast. Apparently this car is available with
a choice of three engines
– a 3.3 V6, a 3.8 V6 and a 4.0 V6. I think mine, in the best traditions of
multiple choice, had d) none of the above.
I don’t want to be stupid and
say it was powered by something you might find in a cement mixer, but that’s
how it felt.
Really. It had no power at all, and if you dared to floor it to, say, get
up a small hill, the gearbox would swap cogs with a
force capable of beheading everyone inside.
I think I’d been given this
car because the girl at the desk had tried to outwit me, in the same way that
Montcalm tried to outwit Wolfe.
Happily, however, we won - again - because just five minutes before we handed
it back my youngest daughter did the decent thing.
And vomited in it.
Model Dodge Grand Caravan
Engine 3301cc, six cylinders
Power 170bhp @ 5000rpm
Torque 200 lb ft @ 4000rpm
Transmission Four-speed automatic
Fuel 22.2mpg (combined cycle)
Acceleration 0-62mph: 11.8sec
Top speed 111mph
Price C$21,970 (£10,946)
Rating Negligible.
