But for cheerfulness, nothing is as warming as the town of Lunenburg. In centuries past, it was a global center of shipbuilding. In its preindustrial form, it was an endeavor that involved lots of photogenic he-man arts and crafts: much hewing and bending of majestic trees into the upended cathedral skeletons of schooners; mutton-chopped stevedores and dignitaries staring out from ship-christening tintypes. Lunenburg's Old Town, with its historic waterfront, has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This means that it is inviolate, inalterable. (It's worth remembering that the Buddhas of Bamiyan were also a World Heritage Site. Fat lot of good that did.) We overshoot the town and drive out to the nearby golf course across the bay in order to get a proper view of it all. It is an adorable Legoland of buildings painted whatever color the fishermen had left over from painting their boats: scarlet, buttercream, slate blue, mint green. Chris says that it can be bleak and deserted in winter, but in high summer, there are hundreds of us visitors thronging the streets and milling about in the many shops. Surely UNESCO must have some sort of intervening policing power to countervail the town's surfeit of fudge.

Lunenburg's perfection brings up the more global question of how to preserve the authenticity of the past without descending into ersatz preciousness. Peggy's Cove, on the other hand, is still a working fishing village, and the houses of its few residents do not appear to have been upgraded, but I hope they're all millionaires. It seems a lot to ask of people, that they continue to live in their photogenic privation, while the souvenir concession not 30 yards away rakes in the bucks.

There is less of a quandary when the attraction is naturally occurring. The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. Over the course of the roughly 12-hour cycle, the water level can vary by as much as 52 feet. According to a pamphlet in a local tourist information center, the billion tons of seawater that flow into Minas Basin twice daily actually tilts the surrounding countryside slightly. We get to Cape Blomidon, our lookout point, while the tide is out, but it has been coming in for an hour, says a man in the parking lot. Even so, there is a vast flat of exposed ocean floor before us. We walk out on the packed red sand rilled with the pattern of the waves. We walk for a good half mile before we reach the sea.

Finally, at the water's edge, I realize that the sea has been traveling back to meet us all this time, and at a real clip, almost the speed of walking. But the water's arrival is a subtler process. First, the ground beneath our feet begins to give just a little. Then, the shade of the red sand morphs along with its softening texture, going from a matte brick to vaguely lustrous, and a few seconds later it is downright shiny. Just as you register this final transformation, the water rushes over your sneakers. Tides are not waves. Fundy is not dramatic in a "Hawaii Five-O" opening credits, Hokusai wood-block print kind of way, but it is an astonishment just the same for the sheer size of the phenomenon. A global impact made manifest. There are a great many Mennonites visiting here as well. Fundy is a real Mennonite tourist destination, according to Chris. They are wearing ankle-length dresses in flowered cotton, their hair pinned back and adorned with small swatches of stiff black fabric — something between a bonnet and a kerchief. Their unadorned, anachronistic simplicity is the perfect complement to this huge minimalist landscape, with its horizontal bands of color: blue sky, green slope, red beach, gray water. My inner art director kicks in immediately. I am not proud that I regard them as props, but I cannot stop myself from pronouncing, albeit silently, "these Mennonites are fabulous!"

Unable to face the heat of New York (or New Yorkers) just yet, I prolong my return by booking a sleeper on The Ocean, the overnight train that will take me from Halifax to Montreal. The price of my ticket includes a cunning fold-down bed in a modest private compartment and some slightly-better-than-airplane meals in the dining car. None of it is anything that could be described as plush. The finishes and surfaces are not fancy, but they are clean if a little chipped and worn here and there. It isn't the Rovos Rail or the Orient Express, but here's what it also isn't: Amtrak! Moreover, The Ocean prides itself on being educational and experiential. There is even a Learning Coordinator, a friendly Francophone woman named Lyne. We can go to the globe car, a double-decker railcar at the back end of the train, and Lyne will be there if we have any questions about the history of the areas we will be passing through.

It is an overcast dusk. There are no stars for the glass roof of the globe car to showcase, but it's very nice to sit on the upper deck watching the land zip by. Up in the front seat is a man, about 65, wearing a polo shirt with the words RAILWAY SOCIETY OF NEWFOUNDLAND printed over the breast, having the time of his life. One of the other passengers asks in French what kind of birds we see flocked on the telephone wires as we cross over the Miramichi River. I allow as how I think they are cormorants (I guess at the word). Thus begins a long three-way conversation with Lyne in French, with me just barely keeping up. This gradual transition from English to French, the two main European cultures that make up Canada, is like the mixing of salt water with fresh in an estuary. Nova Scotia started out French, although that's now more a matter of monument than of fact. The Acadians ended up down in Louisiana, where their own dialect shortened their name to Cajuns. In the present, we almost couldn't drive by a church or a community hall that didn't have a sign out front for the local ceilidh, the Irish-Scottish musical gathering. Now the train is in New Brunswick, which boasts a Celtic history as well as a large Francophone population. Lyne points this out to us and also shows us how she changed her foulard when we crossed over into this province. She is wearing the New Brunswick plaid. There is no designated Quebecois tartan for her to put on when we cross that border. Besides, it will be the middle of the night when we do.

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