Destination next: The Canadian hotspot that belongs on your bucket list

Au revoir, Montreal. Adieu, Quebec City. On this visit to Canada's French-speaking province we're leaving the cities behind, and right now my nose is pressed to the window as a picture-book landscape of countryside and quaint villages flicks by. Having jumped in a minibus outside our Quebec City airport hotel, we're driving east, following the St Lawrence River through the region of Charlevoix all the way to its intersection with the Saguenay Fjord, taking a leisurely couple of days to travel the roughly 200 kilometres.

We'll then turn left to follow the fjord - a spectacular 105-kilometre-long waterway carved out by glaciers 950 million years ago - as far as the town of La Baie, where our final night will be spent on the shores of the intriguingly named Baie des Ha! Ha!, eating dinner in the restaurant of our charming auberge as the sky outside turns gold and pink.

There is much to be said about veering off the beaten track as we are now, and having the singular wonders of a place you know nothing about reveal themselves all around you. Here are some excellent reasons, when in Quebec, to venture beyond the big smokes.

On a highway out of Quebec City along the northern shore of the mighty St Lawrence, we pass through the towns of Boischatel, L'Ange-Gardien and Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, named for the saint - reputedly the maternal grandmother of Jesus - whose eponymous basilica we can see, tantalisingly, through the minibus window. Its twin steeples soar 100 metres into a cloudless sky and if we were to stop at this Catholic pilgrimage site, we would be among almost one million visitors who go there annually.

But Le Massif de Charlevoix - a ski resort mountain which includes, at 770 metres, the steepest vertical drop east of the Canadian Rockies - is our destination, and our mountain guide Jonathan Bergeron is waiting for us at the top of the massif. It is still a month or so before the snow begins to fall, and he leads us on a two-kilometre hike through alpine forest of birch, pine and spruce, home to moose, deer, black porcupine and black bear (a sign warns about avoiding encounters with the latter by walking in a group; and keep the kids close and in eyesight!).

We eventually reach the 152-step stairway that takes us to the top of Le Button - a 30-metre rise built to create an Olympic standard slalom ski run that it was hoped would help secure a Winter Games for Quebec. It did not, but what a knockout of a lookout: we skirt the yoga class taking place on the timber deck to stand at railings and gawk at the view, which appears and disappears as clouds scurry around and beneath us.

A train is tooting somewhere out there - the train of Charlevoix, we discover, which carries passengers on a 125-kilometre river-hugging railway out of Quebec City. Sometimes from our eyrie, as clouds part, we can see the St Lawrence - so omnipresent in Charlevoix - shimmering all the way to its southern shore; and to our left, just visible along the river flats far below, is the former eel-fishing village of Petite-Riviere-Saint-Francois. It was the first French settlement of the region back in 1675 and we will stay there tonight, at Canada's first (and huge - it has 302 rooms and sprawls across 120 hectares) Club Med, which opened in December 2021 and still has all the sparkly-new vibes. lemassif.com/en

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"Everything you see in here, we make with our own hands," says Madeleine Dufour, 11th-generation Quebecois and the daughter of the founders of Famille Migneron de Charlevoix, makers of artisan cheese, wine and spirits. Charlevoix is a hub of small, creative producers, the passionate Dufour explains - its terrain is too mountainous and rocky for mass producers with big equipment. And so, Charlevoix is known as a foodie destination, "because all of the projects created here are edgy, interesting, weird small projects".

Free cheese tastings are held at Famille Migneron daily, and we stab with toothpicks at morsels of their key cheeses, inspired by Europe but distinctly of the local terroir: the signature Migneron, a raclette made from the milk of Charlevoix cows; Tomme de Brebis, made with sheep's milk from the Dufours' own herd, kept just across the road; the poetically named Le Ciel (or sky) de Charlevoix, a blue-vein cheese inspired by Roquefort, where Dufour's dad trained as a cheesemaker. "We get most of our inspiration from products that already exist, but then you make it your own."

Back in 1994, when Dufour's parents began their enterprise, the local food culture wasn't as "bubbly" as it is right now. "People were basically eating cheese curds," she says, adding that the Dufours are the only cheese makers in North America to turn their whey - "every drop of it" - into liquor, namely vodka. The skins of the squashed fruit from their three hectares of cold-climate grape varieties also do not go to waste, being used to make grappa instead.

A couple of years ago, inspired by the Italian liqueur limoncello, Dufour took some of that grappa, added citrusy verbena, sour grapes instead of lemon, and a type of peppercorn that grows in the mountains here, to make her own "limoncello without lemons". The cellar door is the only place you can buy her Verveine and, after a tasting, to purchase a bottle is the only possible option. It will be cracked open in a couple of nights' time, in my sweet little room at an auberge in a village called Riviere-Eternite, on the doorstep of the Saguenay Fjord National Park. The perfect end to an active day in the big Quebec outdoors. famillemigneron.com

We have to get out of our vehicle and run along the side of the road to make it in time for our whale-watching tour with Croisieres AML; we've been caught in the traffic leading to a car ferry that clearly isn't keeping up with today's demand to cross the Saguenay Fjord into Quebec's Cote-Nord. I shall never repeat the speed with which I climb into waterproof orange dungarees, grab a jacket and dash towards the zodiac where our fellow whale-watchers await.

It's barely 20 minutes into our cruise - having thumped under a clear blue sky, wind in our collective hair, across the waters of the Saguenay-St Lawrence Marine Park - before we see the first rainbow-making spouts shooting into the air. Our naturalist guide Catherine Dube, whose commentary is bilingual, knows by sight the humpback whales that we see: they have been given names, like Leprechaun and Queen, Chewbacca and Guadeloupe.

What a show they put on, no less than 10 of them in two groups, spouting and diving and flicking their flukes in this wilderness jewel that is among the best whale-watching spots on the planet. "Sometimes you can see them jumping but that is a mating thing and they are here to feed," Dube explains. With a water temperature of 4 degrees Celsius, "it's too cold here to make babies".

Also in these waters are beluga, minke and fin whales - even blue whales, the largest creatures on Earth, occasionally visit to feed on the abundant krill. At one point we see a single grey seal nearby, its head bobbing up and down with the swell and looking over in our direction, as if to say hello. Dube thinks the seals are ugly. We beg to differ. Its little whiskered head is as adorable as the whales are stupendous. croisieresaml.com

Who can forget the photograph (and instant meme classic) of world leaders, then-German chancellor Angela Merkel chief among them, standing over a seated, recalcitrant Donald Trump at the G7 Summit in 2018. It was held right here, at the French chateau-style 405-room Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu, set grandly for 125 years on a bluff on the edge of La Malbaie town. What an extraordinarily beautiful place for the world order to totter in full international glare.

As I wander the grounds in the early morning, white Adirondack chairs are lined up for prime gazing across the St Lawrence River; four cannons, too, point towards the water at an imaginary enemy. A plaque informs of La Malbaie's roots as a prestigious summer resort town, frequented by wealthy Canadians and Americans who built lovely villas on the hillsides.

We have only one night here, and use it well by dining at the hotel's Restaurant Le Saint Laurent, where head chef Simon Fortin uses local ingredients in French classics that come with twists. The starter of salmon from Charlevoix waters is smoked in-house and served with sea bacon (a type of local seaweed) whipped cream, mustard caviar and yuzu gel; and for my main, slices of veal loin sit among local oyster mushrooms and bearnaise sauce, with extra flavours of maple and miso. It's my favourite meal in Quebec so far, although I am yet to try poutine, that classic Canadian dish of French fries, cheese curds and gravy which originated in Quebec. I don't like its chances of knocking the Fairmont feast from my top spot - it's clever cuisine versus comfort food after all. But we'll see. fairmont.com/richelieu-charlevoix

If you don't like the weather, wait 10 minutes. That's what they say in L'Anse-Saint-Jean, a village of colourful wooden houses with rocking chairs on porches, set on a quiet bay on the fjord's southern shore. It's taken an almost two-hour drive from La Malbaie to get here, leaving the St Lawrence behind to meander westwards along the Saguenay Fjord. There seems to be no-one here, until we see some people on electric bikes whizzing towards us. We're about to jump on some ourselves for a spin into the village's surrounding countryside.

After a practice session, we head for the Pont du Faubourg across the Saint-Jean River. The covered bridge dates to 1929 and is lined inside with paintings of the region by local artists (I'm not surprised to hear this beautiful place is a creative hub). The bridge is quite famous - it used to feature on the Canadian $1000 bill. And back in the 1990s, during a particularly harsh winter, ice swept the bridge off its footings, our guide Graham Park, owner of bike hire company Velo Fjord, tells us. That's how gnarly it gets here, weather wise. At this time of year, though, we get to enjoy some autumn colours and cool breezes.

We cycle for a while alongside the gushing Saint-Jean River, its volume at 10 through the curtain of trees between us and it. Further on, a graveyard is backgrounded by forest and a waterfall cascading down a cliff-face, and we see a white horse cantering across an emerald green field. There are cornfields and farmhouses with tall, steep roofs in classic Quebecois style. The whole thing is ridiculously picturesque.

For lunch, we head back to the centre of the village and Cafe du Quai, where specialities include crepes bretonne, a traditional dish from France's Brittany region. Given our battery-assisted exercise, we've only semi-earned a good feed - but we also need to fuel up for an afternoon kayak on the fjord. La Complete, a crepe with ham, cheese and a sunny-side-up fried egg, does the job for me, and is slightly less extravagant than some others on the menu - like La Tartiflette, made with potato, bacon, cream and fromage Champfleury, a Canadian-made, French-inspired soft cheese.

Just across the road from Cafe du Quai, we pull on wetsuits and life jackets and listen to a comprehensive briefing from Mathieu Boulanger-Messier, co-owner of Fjord en Kayak, before manoeuvring our sea kayaks across the beach and into the water and sealing ourselves in. What follows is two hours of serenity (and an upper body workout) as we paddle out into the deep-blue waters of the fjord, surrounded by hillsides draped in conifer forest and beneath a sky that fortuitously stays clear. We don't spot any sea creatures today, but none of us cares. It feels so wild, so remote, it is adventure enough just to be here. velofjord.ca; fjordenkayak.com; cafeduquai.ca

Tonight, I open my bottle of Verveine in my simple yet sweet room at Auberge du Dimanche, a former priest's residence next door to a church in dot-on-the-map Riviere-Eternite. We've arrived in the dark and let ourselves in via key code, so much of the property isn't revealed to us until the next morning. It was renovated in 2022 by four young business partners and friends who wanted to provide some good, affordable, eco-friendly lodgings not just for guests like us, but for people signed up to the raft of outdoor excursions they offer through their company, Saguenay Adventures.

After we've made our own breakfast from supplied eggs, bread and cereals in the light-filled communal kitchen (and tidied up after ourselves) one of the four, Andreanne Ouellet, tells us how friendly the people in these remote parts are, and how safe it is: people hitchhike, and they don't worry about locking their doors. "Everybody talks to everybody," she says. "And they are proud people, that is part of the charm of the region."

We learn more about the people that afternoon when we reach the town of La Baie and visit the Musee du Fjord, where one exhibition in particular, Roots and Dreams, presents a riveting story about the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region and the rigours of isolation and extreme weather. It tells of the revelations afforded by BALSAC, a population database established 50 years ago that has gathered genealogical data from across Quebec: nine out of 10 French Canadians, for instance, carry the genes of the French immigrants who came to "New France" before 1760.

The exhibition also recounts Quebecois' unwillingness to fight in World War II, being "cold to the idea of being cannon fodder in an imperial conflict". Many avoided conscription through marriage and those who did enlist, our guide Jasmine tells us, were reckless. "There is one story of a Quebecois running after a German soldier with a pitchfork," she says. museedufjord.com/en

When I get the chance to order poutine, it's at lunchtime at a restaurant and microbrewery called Pavillon Noir, overlooking La Baie's international cruise port. Last year, 82 cruise ships called in, spilling tens of thousands of visitors into the area: Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, it would seem, is not as isolated as it used to be. As my travelling companions tuck into French onion soup, my poutine arrives and it's not quite what I expected - the cheese curds are barely tepid lumps. Aren't they meant to be all hot and melty? At least a little bit, I come to understand: the curds should be soft and slightly melted as a result of the hot gravy. Regardless, I get stuck in.

Dinner that day is in the French restaurant at our lodgings for our final night in Quebec, Auberge des Battures, on the Baie des Ha! Ha! (a name that may have derived from the local indigenous language, or an old French word, but nobody seems quite sure). I love this hotel - it oozes vintage charm and character - and the meal leaves my lacklustre poutine in the shade: for entree, feuillete d'escargots (snails in pastry with Ciel de Charlevoix - the very cheese we tasted a couple of days ago at Famille Migneron) and for main, a fillet of Arctic char fished from the St Lawrence River, with a creamy pesto of garlic flowers grown 25 clicks up the road. It's an excellent finish to our short sojourn in a corner of Canada's largest province, made all the better with a glass of white wine that's a blend of vidal, seyval and frontenac blanc grapes. All grown and made right here in Quebec, naturellement.

Getting there: Air Canada flies daily from Sydney to Vancouver, with connections to Quebec City via Montreal.

Getting around: The best way is by car, which you can rent at Quebec City airport. aeroportdequebec.com/en/airport-access/car-rental

Staying there: Rates at Club Med Charlevoix in summer are from about $629 a night for two adults, including all meals and activities. Rooms at the Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu start from about $C370 ($410) a night. Auberge du Dimanche rates start from about $C60, and Auberge des Battures rates are from about $C160. clubmed.com.au; fairmont.com/richelieu-charlevoix; aubergedudimanche.com; hotel-saguenay.com

Explore more: tourisme-charlevoix.com/en; saguenaylacsaintjean.ca/en; bounjourquebec.com/en

The writer was a guest of Bonjour Quebec

Pictures: Charlevoix Tourism/ André-Olivier Lyra; Sarah Maguire; Getty Images; Laurent Silvani Photographie; Marck Guttman