The playground of dinosaurs

In their hurry to head west to Alberta's top-flight attractions, few visitors arriving at Calgary or Edmonton consider taking a side trip east.

This is a pity, since the semi-arid Alberta Badlands 140km east of Calgary are remarkable, not only for the surreal landscape of bare, sunbaked hills and eerie lunar flats dotted with sagebrush and scrubby grass, but also for the traces of dinosaurs here.

These are excellently presented and explained at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, just outside the old coal-mining town of Drumheller.

If this whets your appetite, consider driving the Dinosaur Trail, a road loop that explores surrounding badlands and Dinosaur Provincial Park, source of many fossils - for which you'll need your own transport.