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We were paddling up the Oxtongue towards Ragged Falls, through a canyon of spruce and sugar maple under a deep blue sky. A resting tortoise raised a watchful head from an abandoned beaver lodge to make sure we kept our distance. Small-mouthed bass sipped at the river's mirror-calm surface, and in the distance I could hear the lonely call of a loon behind us on the Lake of Bays.

Thomas, who is eight, was up in the bows of the canoe. I thought his unusual silence meant that he was enjoying the the rhythm of our paddling; how wrong I could be. "It's a long time since we've been to Legoland" he piped up as we ducked under the bleached arm of a fallen fir. But then, after another long pause during which more lily pads with crimson underbellies slipped by, he added by way of second thoughts "this is worth three Legolands put together."

Good old Thomas, ever the diplomat; he knows the right thing to say to please his father. We hadn't come 5,000 miles across the ocean to a land of forests, wolves and bears to spend our time pining for theme parks made entirely out of little plastic bricks.

Paradoxically, the land we'd come to was actually made of water. The Canadian province of Ontario is home to 20 percent of the world's fresh water in a staggering 400,000 lakes and waterways, or virtually one under every bush. Given that these wet blobs are almost universally unpolluted, weed-free and warm (from June onwards, that is) they make an ideal playground for families on holiday.

Ontario's lakeland comes in various grades of civilisation. There's upmarket wild in Muskoka and medium wild around Haliburton, but anywhere further east and you can expect the wildlife to get up close and personal. For British visitors who need to acclimatize themselves to the whole lake holiday concept, the sensible choice is to stay in the more sophisticated Muskoka Lakeland near the town of Huntsville, where you're unlikely to have to chase a bear away from your bins and where the resorts come in all shapes and sizes, although all will have a lake frontage with a freely available range of boats.

Ourselves, we'd booked a little wooden 'traditional cottage' in the grounds of Nor'loch Lodge, the local equivalent of a small Scottish country house hotel. The Nor'loch sat behind its own sandy beach on the Lake of Bays, and it had canoes, pedaloes, sailboats and powerboats for the use of its guests.

We liked it because, although it was family-oriented and most of the guests had children in tow, it hadn't abandoned its pretense to style. The evening meal, for example, was waitress-service in the main dining room with the likes of pan-fried arctic char and moose steak on the menu, and the children were expected to sit down with the adults. When they'd finished, though, there was a video playing in the neighbouring reading room so that they could adjourn and leave us to enjoy the last of the wine in peace.

It would have been easy to have stayed around the Nor'loch all week. The children were as happy to play on the lakeside beach as they would have been on any Mediterranean shore, with the added advantage of the fresh water, the freely available boats and rivers like the Oxtongue to paddle up. But after a while we felt the need to explore a bit further afield, especially as the Nor'loch was a 20 minute drive from Canada's oldest provincial park.

The Algonquin is about as far removed from Legoland as a park could be. Its forest covers an area half the size of Wales and supports a healthy population of wolves, moose and bears. Most of it is too remote to ever see a human being, but the 'park corridor' along the only road has been developed to allow people like us to get a taste of the wild.

Thus, on a succession of sorties, we tried horse-riding, mountain-biking, lake swimming, canoe trekking and walking along a couple of the easy day trails, becoming a bit more adventurous as time went by. By the end of the week we might have been ready to graduate on to something truly wild - but we didn't want to miss our pan-fried arctic char.

Ontario does its best to cater for everyone, and Thomas got his theme park in the end. We spent a couple of entertaining hours in Santa's Village at Bracebridge, with its reindeer rollercoaster and eco-elves wetland area. Santa himself was in residence and consented to have his picture taken with our children. When I remarked that the Village must look wonderful when it was snow-bound, he shook his head. "We close in winter," he said. Initially I found that a bit surprising, but then after a moment's thought I realised why; in winter, Santa has other things on his mind.

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