Stop to watch the tides in the Bay of Fundy. Yield to a Belleisle Bay moose. Detour to the Cape d'Or lighthouse tearoom. You're in the driver's seat for this scenic circle tour through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

In this globalized world, the cities are blurring. Each has the same fluorescent malls housing the same chain stores, the same downtown towers sporting the same corporate logos. But every rural landscape remains unique. Canada's Maritime provinces, a region with no mega-cities at all, offer a tapestry of varied landscapes: sea-washed rocky shores and wilderness rivers, manicured farmlands and raging tide-rips, timeless villages, apple blossoms, whales and soaring eagles. You have to mosey through such landscapes, watching and listening and sniffing. Where to go? Almost anywhere-but here are three special drives.

1. The Lower Saint John Valley
Motorists enter the Maritimes through New Brunswick, either from Maine or via the Trans-Canada Highway from Quebec. Both routes soon encounter the magnificent Saint John river. Rising in the wilderness of northern Maine, the Saint John makes a sweeping arc through the forest, and by the time it reaches New Brunswick near Edmundston it is already a big, powerful waterway. For the next 34 miles, it forms the international boundary-the U.S. on the right bank, Canada on the left. Every little bridge is an international border crossing.

The Saint John Valley is green and lovely from one end to the other, but it is at its most bewitching in its final 93 miles, roughly within a triangle defined by Fredericton, Saint John and Sussex. No major highways spoil this secret triangle, and few tourists ever find it. Here the river runs broad and slow becoming less a river than a glittering web of water, less "a drive" than a wanderer's delight. Tributaries and secondary channels wind back into the forests. The short, wide Jemseg River, like a wooded canal, leads into three interconnected lakes rimmed with farms: Washdemoak Lake, Belleisle Bay and Kennebecasis Bay.

Cattle and sheep graze in sloping fields or are marooned on meadow islands tufted with cottonwood. Flocks of redwinged blackbirds explode from the bulrushes. A sign on a roadside reads, "Caution: Grandkids Crossing." Watch for moose, deer, beavers, osprey-and for eel fishermen, U-pick strawberry farms and apple orchards and villages inhabited by potters and painters. Stop for a swim. The riverbanks are sandy beaches and water is warm.

Ocean-going sailboats ghost along the sheltered channels, voyaging through sedge grass and water lilies. A sturdy little tanker plows up-river, bound for Fredericton, the province's daffy little capital. Windsurfers skim across the ruffled water. Tiny ferryboats are pulled across the waterways on heavy cables. (One has a birdhouse on its bridge, with families of swallows flying in and out of it all summer.) Massive concrete wharfs evoke a time when the river itself was New Brunswick's main highway. You can ramble these peaceful valleys for days. You can launch a canoe almost anywhere. You can rent a houseboat and stay for a week, rent a house and stay for a month or heave a deep sigh and stay for a lifetime.

The Saint John ends with a natural miracle, the Reversing Falls. At high tide, the Bay of Fundy rises 16 feet above the river level and salt water puts inland across a rocky ridge. At low tide, the bay lies 16 feet below the river and the river tumbles down to Saint John Harbour and outward to the sea. Mobs of seabirds wheel and plunge in the boiling currents. So do a few intrepid kayakers.

The Saint John Valley is serene and bucolic: the Bay of Fundy is violent and bizarre. Twice a day, an amount of water equal to the total volume of all the world's rivers moves in and out of the bay. The bay's progressively shallower floor and narrowing shorelines compress this huge influx dramatically, driving the water levels up as much as 52 feet to produce the highest tides in the world. In the upper bay, the incoming tide advances up the estuaries as a "tidal bore," a wall of water moving as fast as eight miles per hour.

2. The Fundy Shore Eco-Tour
For a memorable Fundy drive, rejoin the Trans-Canada Highway at Sussex, New Brunswick, and drive 90 minutes east to Amherst, Nova Scotia. Turn south on Route 302 for two miles and then take Route 242 to Macan and the Tidal View Wetlands Park. If you miss the Maccan tidal bore, there's another at nearby River Hebert.

The drama of the Bay of Fundy becomes obvious at the village of Joggins. Furious tides scour the shoreline four times a day, ripping down the cliffs to create glittering banks of red mud. The Joggins cliffs are packed with fossils and every tide exposes new ones- ferns and tree trunks, dragonflies, spiders, sharks and clam. Removing fossils from the cliffs is forbidden, but you may pick up loose ones on the beach. From Joggins. A 24-mile drive runs thorough woodland interrupted only by the hamlet of Shulie, population two. (That's right: the only permanent residents are the husband and wife.) At Apple River, the road cuts inland, bypassing Nova Scotia's newest provincial park at Cape Chignecto. You reach the Bay of Fundy again at Advocate Harbour, a large basin that is completely empty at low tide.

From Advocate, a side road leads to panoramic vies from the clifftops at Cape d'Or. A lighthouse-now a tearoom and guesthouse-lies far below on a ledge jutting into the bay, providing a front-row seat to the drama of the tides. The currents race and swirl and collide in front of the lighthouse, bursting upward over an underwater reef and tormenting the water into whirlpools and overfalls known locally as "the Dory Rips."

These gilded cliffs constitute a record of frozen cataclysm. During the Triassic Period, 200 million years ago, all the continents were joined together. When the continental plates tore apart, magma from the earth's core belched upward through a series of volcanoes along a rift valley that became the Bay of Fundy. Molten minerals flowed into veins and pockets created by expanding gases. These minerals became agates, amethysts and zeolites and, at Cape d'Or, veins of almost pure copper, which led Samuel de Champlain, in 1607, to name it the Cape of Gold. The geological record exposed here by the Fundy tides is 175 to 300 million years in age. It contains a stunning variety of fossils and traces of almost every mineral on earth. You can literally touch this colossal story in the cobble beach stones made of amethyst, copper, agate and basalt.

3. The Cabot Trail
The road to Parsboro swings along the cliffs, dives back to cross streams in the forest, rises up again past tiny farms and homesteads and brings you to charming villages like Port Greville. History surrounds you here: adventure and disaster, triumph and decline. The pretty hamlet of Spencer's Island (which is not an island) was once Nova Scotia's premier shipbuilding town. You may know the story of the mysterious Mary Celeste , which was found sailing herself off the Azores in 1872, place settings ready on her galley table and not a soul aboard. She was built in Spencer's Island. The Mary Celeste story became a play at The Ship's Company Theatre in Parrsboro, which presents original plays all summer long on the foredeck of a retired Fundy ferry, the MV kipawo. Parrsboro is also the site of the superb Fundy Geological Museum. Whose displays explain the geological richness of the Bay.

The road from Advocate to Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, is known as "the Little Cabot Trail/" to reach the orignal Cabot Trail. Follow Route 2 for 56 miles along the lovely Fundy shoreline to meet the Trans-Canada Highway again at Truro. Three more hours and you're in Baddeck. From her, the Cabot trail is a roller coaster rimming the mountainous northern peninsula of Cape Breton Island-the most famous and dramatic drive in the Maritimes. Much of it runs through a pristine national park. It has everything: breathtaking corniche roads high over the open sea, fishing villages huddled around rocky coves, world-ranked golf courses and resorts, bear and moose and whales, a lively French-speaking Acadian population on its western shore, North America's only Gaelic college on its eastern shore, inland lakes, salmon steams, regattas, craft shops, plenty of restaurants and hundreds of hotel rooms.

All of which means the Cabot trail in summer is busy, which is part of its charm. Baddeck, the largest town on the Trail, is located on the Bras d'Or Lakes, a vast and almost landlocked arm of the sea that s a special favorite of the international yachting crowd. It was the summer home of Alexander Graham Bell: don't miss the museum dedicated to his life and work. Cheticamp, the Trail's other major town, is a French-speaking village on the warm waters of the Gulf of St Lawrence. The seafood here is excellent, and the unique Acadian culture permeates the community, from the towering Catholic church to the hand0hooked rugs and wooden folk art.

Many Maritimers prefer to drive the Cabot trail in October, when the warm, bright days and crisp clear nights carry a hint of oncoming winter and the mountains are a tumult of fluorescence. The road soars up to the east side peaks of Mackenzie Mountain and Cape Smokey, and then plunges into steep valleys clad in hot pink, fluorescent orange, vivid lime, blazing scarlet. Fishermen casting flies in the quick little rivers are lost against the riot of color. The inns and restaurants are still open, but you won't need a reservation. There are superlative concerts in village after village, all part of the island-wide Celtic Colours international festival.

Make your way home along the Gulf of St. Lawrence down Route 19, the Ceilidh trail, and then Route 6, the Sunrise Trail. Then take Highway 103 down the South Shore or Highway 101 through the Annapolis Valley. Both routes lead to the Bar Harbor ferry at Yarmouth. Or cross to Prince Edward Island on the Caribou ferry and return to New Brunswick via the eight-mile-long Confederation Bridge. Follow the Gulf of St. Lawrence coast up to Quebec or the Fundy coast down to Maine. Then plan your next visit. Once is never enough.

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