If you only do one paid thing on the Canadian side, make it the boat. Niagara City Cruises runs the Voyage to the Falls tour out of a dock below the Canadian shoreline, carrying you past the American Falls and then straight into the mist thrown up by Horseshoe Falls, the largest of the three waterfalls here.
You will get wet. That is the point. The crew hands every passenger a recycled rain poncho on the way in, and by the time the boat noses into the basin at the foot of Horseshoe Falls, you are inside a wall of spray with the roar of more than three thousand tonnes of water a second going over the crest above you.
When to go
The first and last sailings of the day are the calmest. Midday on a summer weekend is the busiest stretch, and the queue can run forty minutes or more. Buy a timed ticket online before you arrive and you walk past most of it.
Sunset sailings are the quiet favourite. The light softens, the crowds thin out, and on fireworks nights you are on the water when they go up over the gorge.
Good to know
The boat is fully accessible, the trip lasts about twenty minutes on the water, and the dock sits at the bottom of an incline railway from the clifftop. Bring a dry bag for your phone, hold the rail, and do not bother with an umbrella. Nobody up there has ever kept one open.
