Canada is more than its hulking-mountain, craggy-coast good looks: it also cooks extraordinary meals, rocks cool culture and unfurls wild, moose-spotting road trips.
Lonely Planet will get you to the heart of Canada, with amazing travel experiences and the best planning advice:
inspirational images and recommendations from our expert authors
planning features and top itineraries to help you plan the perfect trip
local secrets and hidden travel gems that will make your trip unique
plus features on national parks, scenic drives and train trips, outdoor activities and wine regions.
Coverage includes: Planning chapters, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Labrador, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Yukon Territory, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Understand and Survival chapters.
Karla Zimmerman:Karla lives in Chicago, where she has been testing bar stools and cheering on the Cubs (the city's hopeless north-side baseball team) for the past 25 years. She writes travel features for newspapers, books, magazines and radio, and has contributed to National Geographic Traveler, National Public Radio, the BBC and Chicago Tribune, among many others. It's a long way from the early days, when she wrote about gravel for a construction magazine and got to trek to places like Fredonia, Kansas.For Lonely Planet she has authored or co-authored guides to Chicago, Amsterdam, Washington DC, the USA, Canada, Caribbean and Netherlands.When she's not chained to her desk, Karla is a rabid traveler who might be found anywhere from the misty heights of Machu Picchu to the dripping jungles of Angkor Wat, from the cumin-colored dunes of the Sahara to that tasty donut shop down the road. Her itineraries have roamed through North, Central, and South America; Eastern and Western Europe; the Middle East; Asia; Africa; and Australia.Benedict Walker:Born in Newcastle, Australia, notions of the beach are core to Ben's idea of self, having traveled hundreds of thousands of kilometres from the sandy shores of home. Ben was given his first Lonely Planet guide (Japan) when he was 12. Two decades later, he'd write chapters for the same publication: a dream come true. A communications graduate and travel agent by trade, Ben whittled away his twenties gallivanting around the globe. He speaks fluent Japanese and has contributed to LP's Japan guide, twice. Ben thinks the best thing about travel isn't as much about where you go as who you meet: living vicariously through the stories of kind strangers enriches one's own experience. Ben has also written and directed a play, toured Australia managing the travel logistics for top-billing music festivals and is experimenting with a return to his original craft of photography and film-making.John Lee:Born and raised in the historic UK city of St. Albans, John grew up in the lengthy shadow of London, finding as many opportunities as possible to gorge on the capital's rich diet of museums and galleries. Slowly succumbing to the lure of overseas exotica, he arrived on Canada's West Coast in 1993 to begin an MA in Political Science at the University of Victoria. Regular trips home to Britain ensued, along with stints living in Tokyo and Montreal, before he returned to British Columbia to become a full-time freelance writer in 1999.Now living in Vancouver, John specializes in travel writing and has contributed to more than 150 different publications around the world. These include the Guardian, Independent, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Sydney Morning Herald, National Geographic Traveler and BBC.com. He also has a travel column in Canada's Globe and Mail national newspaper. You can read some of his stories (and see some of his videos) online at https://www.johnleewriter.com. John has worked on around 25 Lonely Planet books, including Canada, British Columbia, Western Europe, Vancouver and Europe on a Shoestring.Celeste Brash:Celeste currently lives in Portland ,Oregon after 15 years of tropical adventures in French Polynesia. Before her island escapades she lived in Southeast Asia, attended university in Thailand, studied gorillas at the San Francisco Zoo and taught English as a second language (in an American accent) in Brighton, England -- among other things. She's been writing guidebooks for Lonely Planet since 2005 and her travel articles have appeared in major media including the LA Times, BBC Travel, Travel & Leisure and Islands Magazine. She's currently writing a book about her five years on a remote pearl farm in the Tuamotu Atolls and is represented by the Donald Maass Agency, New York.Brendan Sainsbury:Born and raised in the UK in a town that never merits a mention in any guidebook (Andover, Hampshire), Brendan spent the holidays of his youth caravanning in the English Lake District and didn't leave Blighty until he was nineteen. Making up for lost time, he's since squeezed 70 countries into a sometimes precarious existence as a writer and professional vagabond. His rocking chair memories will probably include staging a performance of 'A Comedy of Errors' at a school in war-torn Angola, running 150 miles across the Sahara Desert in the Marathon des Sables, and hitchhiking from Cape Town to Kilimanjaro with an early, dog-eared copy of LP's Africa on a Shoestring. In the last eleven years, he has written over 40 books for Lonely Planet from Castro's Cuba to the canyons of Peru. When not scribbling research notes, Brendan likes partaking in ridiculous 'endurance' races, strumming old Clash songs on the guitar, and experiencing the pain and occasional pleasures of following Southampton Football Club.Sarah Richards:Loyal to the mountains and forests of her native BC, Sarah vowed never to love another Canadian province. But when she started her undergraduate degree at McGill University, a torrid love affair with Quebec's enticing French flavors threatened to break her ties with home forever.After graduation, Sarah stumbled into writing in Japan, where she contributed to a number of magazines, newspapers, and travel guides. She has been frantically filling notebooks ever since, supporting her fiction work, her travel bug, and her pain au chocolat addiction with freelance travel writing and editing assignments.Her journeys have taken her across dusty deserts on the Tibetan plateau, into fiery volcanos in rural Japan, and down the dank dungeons of Welsh castles. After living in Japan and England for five years, she has settled in Brooklyn, New York.Andy Symington:Andy is an Australian freelance writer who has prowled the globe insatiably. After studying archaeology and psychology, he worked in the navigation business and, for some time, in educational and community theatre before long travels eventually saw him wind up in Edinburgh, selling whisky to the Scots.Andy first became involved in writing when someone cannily contracted him to contribute to a pub guide, and his formidable research on that title broke a man but launched a career.He has since written or worked on over a hundred books for Lonely Planet (especially in Europe and Latin America) and other publishing companies, and has published articles on numerous subjects for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. He is the author of a novel, part-owns and operates a rock bar and is currently working on several other fiction and non-fiction writing projects.Andy moved to Northern Spain many years ago and lives in a place where the climate is described as 'nine months of winter, three months of hell'. When he's not off with a backpack in some far-flung corner of the world, he can probably be found watching the tragically poor local football side or tasting local wines after a long walk in the nearby mountains.Carloline Sieg:Caroline Sieg ([Link Removed] is a half-Swiss, half-American freelance writer & editor focusing on travel, food, arts, design & the outdoors. Born to a Swiss-French mother and a Polish father who emigrated to the US in the 1960s, she visited 11 countries before the age of one. Since then, she has spent most of her life moving back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, with significant stops in Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Miami, London and the Valais (Switzerland). She grew up bilingual (English & German) and picked up conversational French and basic Spanish along the way.She began her career producing foreign-language textbooks at a small educational publisher and later worked in the higher education division at John Wiley & Sons, Inc. She then hopped over to travel publishing, first as a travel editor at Frommer's Travel in the US and later as a commissioning editor in Lonely Planet's London office. She has written about the US, Europe and Asia for magazines, websites, mobile applications and guidebooks.Ryan Ver Berkmoes:I've been a Lonely Planet author since 1997 and have worked on over 100 guidebooks.
