If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Kenya

Sizing up the ungainly red rig in a Prague parking lot, one puzzled passerby conjectured that it was a dormitory-on-wheels for an ascetic order of monks.

Another observer, spotting a bus-trailer combine on a dusty back road in India, ? guessed that it must be a fancy transport for carrier pigeons. Equally baffled reactions greet Rotels wherever they turn up, from Tehran to Tierra del Fuego. Rotels? It is short for "rolling hotels," which may be the ultimate in no frill, if-it's-Tuesday-it-must-be-Kenya world travel.

There are 42 Rotels based in twelve countries and all owned by Rotel Tours a West German travel firm. In the 17 years since its first Mercedes bus dormitory left Munich for Jerusalem, the company has booked more than 150,000 customers on trips through scores of nations on six continents. Thi year some 20,000 passengers will choose to leave the driving, the cooking, the sleeping arrangements and almost everything else to Rotels.

The Rotel catalog offers 92 different itineraries, ranging from one-weel dashes from Germany to Italy, France Spain or England to month-long trek across the Middle East, Afghanistan, the Ukraine, Thailand and Malaysia, Australia, South America and the U.S When Peking permits, Rotel will probably offer 30-day tours of mainland China for around $2,000. At prices ranging from about $100 a day for a seven day trip to Rome and Assisi to $2,00( for a 40-day Australian marathon, Rotels are probably the cheapest way available anywhere to see the world.

But not the easiest. Each Rotel accommodates 39 passengers, a driver-mechanic-cook and a tour guide. By day the group rides conventionally in the bus, with the usual hurried stops for sightseeing and picture taking. In the evening the juggernaut pulls into a camping ground or stops at a village fountain, and the action shifts to the 40-ft. trailer hitched to the rear. It becomes an outdoor kitchen, dining area, dressing room and dormitory. After supper the tourists repair to the sleeping quarters: a morguelike arrangement of 3-ft-wide bunks stacked three high and 13 across, each with a single window for ventilation.

Life aboard the rig suggests Devil's Island more than a dream vacation. Rotels have no toilet facilities; when there is no campground, oasis or hotel on their route, passengers go without bathing. Each morning after breakfasting and making their beds, they resume their seats in the bus for another ten hours on the road. Only two meals a day are included: tea or coffee, bread, butter and jam for breakfast and "quality German cooking"--all canned--for supper. Passengers must use the same sheets for the duration of the trip and, on journeys through remote areas, be prepared--as a German woman put it--to "sleep in our own dirt." One tall tourist found the beds so cramped that he had to sleep with his legs sticking out of the window; at least, he suggested, the management should provide bed socks.

The appeal of rugged Rotel travel lies chiefly in its remarkably low cost. A month-long southern Africa tour costs only $1,500, for example, including the charter flight, and takes passengers 6,000 miles from Rhodesia through Mozambique to Capetown and up the west coast to Angola. A 30-day tour of the U.S. and Canada costs $1,600, also including air fare from Germany (it is not available to Americans because, say Rotel officials, they do not want to compete with U.S. travel operators). A highlight, according to company brochures, is Las Vegas, with "the world's most extravagant neon signs."

The Rotel's Bavarian inventor, Georg Hoeltl, points out that his rigs enable vacationers to get to places that do not have hotels or even campsites. His Sahara trip from Tunisia to Nigeria, billed as "the most daring tourist program ever offered," is almost impossible to duplicate by private car. Conventional accommodations are expensive or nonexistent at most stopovers on Hoeltl's 7,000-mile Indian expedition or his 8,000-mile Peru-to-Patagonia haul. "We go to the interior, where the ordinary people live," says Jan Buchta, a veteran Rotel guide, who likes to call the tours "study trips. In Africa, for example, we not only show guests Nairobi and Mombasa but also the hinterland of Kenya."

Though Rotel never advertises, its tours are booked up months in advance. A typical group of Rotelmates includes not only cash-strapped young and elderly travelers but also well-to-do tourists with a taste for the offbeat. "We cater to a special sort of clientele," Hoeltl admits. "Most of those who sign up come back." From his tour profits, Rotelier Hoeltl has built a deluxe, 200-room Bavarian-style inn in his native Tittling. There, at prices ranging up to $40 a day, Rotel veterans who have seen the world from the windows of Holtl's buses may come to relax, sail in his man-made lake, dance in his discotheque and eat hearty Bavarian food that does not come out of a can.

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