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A Refreshing 3 day Getaway
By: Azeem Marecan | Wed May 23, 2018 at 01.05 AM
With the long weekend 19-21 May, 2018 coming up, we heard from one of our friends of this 3 day bus trip to east Canada and wanted to give it a try. Based on reading a few reviews here, we were a little worried about the whole "Chinese-driv
..en package", the Hotel stay, food, tour guide's preferred langauge (Chinese) and so on. My wife and I reprogrammed our priorities to focus only on the places we go, carry our own food, and try to adjust with the Hotel.
But we were wrong, and we did not experience any of the concerns stated by the previous reviewers. In fact, we give this trip a 5 star and would strongly recommend this to people who haven't been east Canada. It was LOVELY. I'll detail our experience below:
Our guide's name was Monica. Monica was extremely organized, had the entire trip planned out well in her head, and made necessary changes to itinerary owing to the weather, without missing out on anything we signed up for.
She messaged us the quick tips a day in advance and told us to come 45 mins early owing to the rain which could potentially slow us down. I totally agreed with this decision.
Itinerary of days 1 and 3 were switched and that fell beautifully into the plan without making it seem haphazard or unprepared. The company running this tour is a Chinese company and the tour guide spoke in Mandarin and English with an equal importance to both the languages.
Monica was very professional yet fun, and helped us out with any questions we had.
We stayed in Quality Hotel in Montreal. The room was clean, bed was comfy, breakfast was provided - in short - no complaints whatsoever for what you'll be using the room for.
My favorite part of the trip was Quebec City. We really fell in love with the European style shops and roads.
On the final day, we went on a cruise on 1000 Islands, and that was a spectacular experience as well.
Below are a few things that we found a little difficulty in, but we managed and Monica was kind enough to help us out as well.
1. Getting vegetarian food is a huge challenge - The travels arranges Asian buffet food for you, which you need to pay extra for obviously. But that didn't suit our taste, so we had to hunt for vegetarian food. We were lucky to find a place in Ottawa and packed that for our dinner. The closest food to vegetarian in Quebec City was eggs. We didn't mind that, so had it for lunch. Dinner again was in an Asian restaurant, so we used Google to find an Indian restaurant, and were lucky to find one call Restaurant Gandhi in Montreal. We packed our dinner from there. The lunch arranged on 1000 islands was a buffet, but had good spread of vegetables, so that worked for us.
2. Traveling with a crowd brings in group dynamics (Not a fault of the travels, but that's the nature of bus trips). The crowd can be late to show up, loud (especially the kids), and small kids kept kicking the back of my seat, which became annoying after a certain point. I chose to let Monica know of this end of the day and she immediately took the feedback and promised there wont be any kids sitting behind me the next day :)
A few suggestions for future travelers:
1. If you're vegetarian or a Muslim couple like us, try to get your own food for breakfast and lunch on the 1st day. You will find some place for dinner. Try to get extra fruits and some breads as well.
2. You're traveling with an unknown crowd, so you may have to be patient when someone delays, or try to adjust when kids kick the back of your seat. Let your tour guide know, and they will do their best to help you.
3. The trip can be tiring at the end, ensure you plan for an extra day off after the trip.
Besides the suggestions, its a fun, educative, and really enjoyable trip. And I would definitely recommend people not to miss this before winter arrives.
Enjoy! Read full review
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