Robin and Ben Parker aren’t the type to keep bored for long.
Despite being self-described “city boy” Londoners, the two English brothers have worked up quite a penchant for extreme adventures. Less than a week after completing a 900-mile kayaking journey along the Canadian coastline of the Pacific Ocean, Robin, 20, and Ben Parker, 18, returned to Eugene in early September, their first rest from travel in over one month.
It would prove to be a brief one.
Robin, with longish blond hair and sporting a scraggly red beard, spent the past year studying at Oregon on exchange from Aberdeen University in Scotland. He decided to end his time in the States by inviting his younger brother Ben, 18, to paddle from Vancouver, B.C. all the way to Juneau, Alaska, using a popular route known as Canada’s Inside Passage. The route follows protected waterways from the Pacific Ocean by staying, for the most part, to the inside of the thousands of islands that line the coast.
Once back, however, the two brothers’ paths diverted sharply. While Robin flew home to London on Sept. 6, Ben’s flight from Los Angeles to London wasn’t scheduled until Sept. 24. To fill the time, he planned to ride his road bike from Eugene to Los Angeles, following U.S. Highway 101 and California State Highway 1, two popular coastal routes. Ben’s bike adventure was inspired by a similar trip Robin took the year before, biking from San Francisco to Juneau. And the ferry that Robin rode home from Juneau on that trip took the Inside Passage back to the United States, which gave Robin ample time to plan their kayaking trip.
Just because Robin wanted to paddle the route didn’t mean the brothers were expert paddlers. By the time they started in the water in Vancouver, Ben, distinguishable from his brother with his blonde buzz cut, had only “a couple of days” experience in the water, while Robin had spent the past year kayaking primarily with the University’s Outdoor Program. No problem, they decided. For the brothers, the chance for adventure trumps any type of potential hiccup. And that means not believing in itineraries.
“Most of my trips that I’ve really planned myself, it’s more like having a starting point and an ending point, and a rough route and you just sort of see what happens along the route,” said Robin, a geography major.
“And cool stuff happens if you leave space in your timetable.”
Without a rigid plan, the brothers were free to make their accommodations wherever they wanted, choosing to camp almost every night alongside their kayaks on the nearest shoreline.
“With the kayaking, for example, it depends on how far you can go and the winds, how you’re feeling that day, the current and the weather – there are too many factors to take into account,” Ben said.
Broken down into four sections, the trip started along Vancouver Island’s eastern coastline for 11 days before taking a nine-hour ferry ride to Prince Rupert, Canada, the unofficial halfway mark.
“One of the reasons we took the ferry is so that we didn’t have to be paddling all day every day from dawn ’til dusk,” said Ben.
From Prince Rupert, it took two weeks to reach Juneau. While there, another week was spent sightseeing around the surrounding area, including the Tracy Arm, a well-known inlet just east of the Inside Passage that is home to massive glaciers. For the return trip, the same route was traced – though this time from the comfortable cabin of another ferry.
Along the route, the brothers were firsthand witnesses to many of the experiences visitors expect when thinking of the Canadian and Alaskan coastline. On a couple occasions, they found themselves only a rivers’ width from black bears. Another night, the brothers set up camp alongside a sea lion colony, where they spied whales just off the shoreline in the sunset.
In retrospect, the brothers were pleased with the trip’s difficulty.
“I was expecting after a long day to be more tired than I was,” said Ben.
“I’d say it was a little easier. I kind of thought there would be one moment where everything went majorly wrong. But everything went along fine, no major problems,” Robin recalled.
The brothers’ English heritage and adventures naturally lead to a good-natured comparison to Bear Grylls, who finds his way to civilization as part of his “Man vs. Wild” show on the Discovery Channel. But keeping in mind their combined travels, let’s just say that when Robin tells you that he believes Bear Grylls’s job “didn’t seem that daunting or whatever,” you believe him.
For Ben, kayaking was just the beginning of his odyssey that will see him spend at least the next three months in India, where he will volunteer at a school. In classic Parker fashion, however, he plans to pedal home to England from India by rickshaw – a roughly 4,000 mile-long ride.
“It kind of depends on the situation in Pakistan and Iran and whether I can buy a rickshaw. I don’t think buying a rickshaw should be a problem and I’m sort of fairly confident about Iran and Pakistan.”
And if the situation gets too dangerous in either country?
“I’d have to go through the Himalayas, no way.”