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Manitoba is distinguished principally by its parks , thousands of acres of wilderness, lake, river and forest that boast wonderful scenery, great hikes and hundreds of kilometres of canoe routes. One of the best is Riding Mountain National Park , 250km northwest of Winnipeg, which derives its name from the fur trappers who changed from canoe to horseback to travel across its wooded highlands. On the southern edge of the park, the tourist village of Wasagaming is a useful base for exploring the surrounding countryside, which incorporates areas of deciduous and boreal forest, lake and grassland. Manitoba's provincial parks include the dramatic landscapes and difficult whitewater canoe routes of the remote Atikaki Wilderness Park , the lakeside marshes and forests of Hecla Park , and yet more canoe routes in Duck Mountain Park , which is also noted for its fishing. Other than the parks and lakeshores, most of Manitoba's significant attractions are concentrated in and around Winnipeg, and many of the province's smaller villages and towns are not really tourist destinations. The notable exceptions are Brandon and Souris , both in the southwest corner of the province, and remote Churchill , a wild outpost right up north on the shores of Hudson Bay that's a great place for seeing beluga whales and polar bears, but overrun by visitors and documentary film crews. Elsewhere, Dauphin , Neepawa and Minnedosa are three of the more agreeable prairie towns, but almost all the other settlements are virtually indistinguishable, despite the diverse backgrounds of the European immigrants who cleared and settled Manitoba in the late nineteenth century. Most of them were rapidly and almost entirely assimilated, but the villages around Dauphin are still dominated by the onion domes of the Ukrainians' Orthodox churches, and Gimli , on the west side of Lake Winnipeg, has a pleasant museum tracing the history of its Icelandic settlement. There are reasonably regular bus services that run between Manitoba's main settlements, and most of the village bus stops are within relatively comfortable walking distance of at least one hotel. However, nearly all of Manitoba's parks are difficult to reach and impossible to tour by bus, with the exception of Riding Mountain Park , where the service from Winnipeg stops right in the centre of Wasagaming; weird Park , where a bus passes through on the Trans-Canada on its way east; and Spruce Woods Park , close to the bus routes from Carberry and Brandon. VIA Rail operates just two train services to and from Winnipeg, each running three times weekly: the main east-west line connects Winnipeg with Toronto, Saskatoon, Jasper and Vancouver, and a northern line runs to Churchill, via The Pas, well beyond the reach of the road.
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