Am I in Brittany? I was aiming for Australia...

Oops! You're in the wrong Sydney. Never mind, says Simon Calder, it's lovely (in a French sort of way)

The strangest thing about the town that is perched on Cape Breton Island, on the leading edge of Nova Scotia, is not that it can all-too-easily be confused with its namesake in Australia. The pair of Sydneys could, after all, be unidentical twins: far-flung communities of the Empire that began to develop in the 18th century, and grew in the Victorian era around a harbour. Each has beaches close by, and plenty of options for sailing. The Nova Scotian answer to Gay Mardi Gras in Australia's largest city is "Action Week", which finishes tonight. The festival of music and sport is ambitiously billed as "the only week with nine days of fun".

Nor is the oddest feature of Sydney, Nova Scotia the fact that its population of 30,000 and a modest number of visitors can support an impressive range of tourist facilities including the Cape Breton Centre for Science and Heritage, a casino, guided walks of the historic centre, and tours by guides – in period costume – of Cossit House, built in 1847. Nor even is it that, this month, it is considerably cheaper to go the extra 15,000 miles to reach Sydney, New South Wales.

The strangest thing about Sydney, Nova Scotia, is what lies a short distance across the water: France.

I do not mean the town of Louisbourg, a partly reconstructed 18th-century French fortified town that stands nearby. I mean the real France, the département of St-Pierre et Miquelon. These islands, as Gallic as Gitanes, are lumps of rock tucked beneath the wing of Newfoundland, but most easily reached by Air St-Pierre's twice-weekly flight from Sydney. The islands' existence in North America's armpit is an anomaly of the 1713 Utrecht Treaty, which carved up the world and left a corner of Canada that is forever French, legally as well as culturally. Its status made it a huge warehouse for bootleggers during Prohibition in the US, and even today St-Pierre is a smuggler's paradise for those in heavily taxed Canada.

Anyone looking for more than cheap booze can eat well (assuming the fromage ship from Cherbourg arrived on schedule), talk to some of the 7,000 people in a language much closer to metropolitan French than the garbled Québécois version and – in half an hour or so – make their merry way around an island resounding with Gallic order, with la poste, le mairie and cottages clinging tenuously to the island's rocky slopes.

Tiny planes or larger boats sail across from the main island, St-Pierre, to bigger, balder Miquelon, which is connected to a third shred of France, Langlade, by a sand-bar that has grown up because of all the shipwrecks over the centuries. Looking at the bare, weatherbeaten rocks, you could easily believe you are in Brittany. What did that plane ticket say again?

To reach Sydney, Nova Scotia, simply book a ticket to Australia on the internet. Only joking... Book an Air Canada flight; through www.expedia.co.uk, for travel in the coming week you will pay £752 return from Heathrow via Halifax. From Sydney, Air St-Pierre (001 902 562 3140) flies twice-weekly in summer to St Pierre for a return fare of C$202 (£83)