Peter Hughes— Telegraph.co.uk
Lounges, personal headsets, and itineraries that explore the Americas and south-East Asia: coach tours are the new way to travel.
Hitting the road through the national parks of the United States.
In three days' time I would be spotting prairie dogs from the windows of an American tour bus. Before that I was spotting luggage labels in Terminal 4 at Heathrow.
American sojourn: the Crazy Horse monument, South Dakota.The ones I was looking for were bright red, orange and blue. They were easy to find but I studied them like tarot cards: they held clues to my future. Those gaudy little baggage tags identified the total strangers who would be intimate companions for the next 15 days.
Soon I could recognise a fellow traveller unaided. We were all of "a certain age", the men in windcheaters and stout shoes, the women with their hair cut manageably short for travelling. We were "silver travellers", "denture venturers", members of a superannuated jet set, our pockets packed with "grey pounds". We were a coach party.
More than that, we were a British coach party. The tags were there strictly so the airport reps could find us, not as a pretext for socialising. An American group, who would find themselves so labelled with name badges, would know each other by nickname before they reached the departure gate. We [British] confined our labels to our luggage, where they generated little force fields to repel any embarrassingly premature introductions.
They were still working when we arrived in Denver. At the airport we had our first stray. Mr B, who was travelling on his own, went missing in the 30 yards between entering the concourse and the group rendezvous.
Public address announcements were made. Sherry, the tour manager, scurried through the terminal like a hound without a scent. The rest of us stood awkwardly in couples, as if we had just been evacuated from a perilous building and were waiting to be allowed back in.
Mr B was retrieved and we boarded the bus— bus, note, not coach: coaches in the United States teach sport. In two weeks' time it would deliver us to Phoenix airport. In the meantime it would take us through the American West into six states and eight national parks and to four national monuments, memorials or historic sites. It would also deposit us at 11 different hotels.
Sherry picked up the microphone to welcome us to America. If previous tours were anything to go by, we might have trouble with hotel bath taps. "Some push, some pull and some have little things that turn in the middle. They are designed to confuse you," she said. Sherry Lehman is well versed in the preoccupations of British tour groups. She speaks the language, too. With her it is "queues" and "loos" rather than "lines" and "johns".
Sherry has been a bus tour manager for 15 years. Before that she was an airline flight attendant who once flew GIs to the Vietnam War— a lord, well, lady of the aisles in the air and on land. She must be in her sixties, but with Sherry it's not a question you ask.
She has a cackling laugh, a mischievous grin and a gleaming bob of silver hair, and she powers through the day with the momentum of a bowling ball. Problems disperse like skittles; uncooperative clients get tactful short shrift, too. On one tour she presented a persistent latecomer with a watch. The bus was Sherry's stage, each day another part of her repertoire. She was on tour as much as we were.
Towards the end of our two weeks her customary sangfroid momentarily slipped. A hotel was slow in handling our luggage and Sherry was flustered when she came on to the bus. "There's the old Spencer Tracy line: 'Never let 'em see you sweat'. And this morning I let you see me sweat," she said. Her frustration was understandable because the business of checking in and out of hotels was normally as efficient as a production line. Room keys were distributed as soon as we arrived and luggage delivered within minutes. Not once did we have to fill in a registration form.
On the first morning John, another solo traveller and a benign member of the awkward squad, asked why American buses had only one door. Bob Pearson, our driver, said without much conviction that he thought it was illegal in America to have more.
Ridiculous, declared John, a retired aeronautical engineer. He had done the arithmetic. "Forty-one passengers. Ten minutes to embark and disembark, times 100: that's 2,000 minutes. We are going to spend two days getting in and out." Regular passengers looked alarmed as they wondered why they had never noticed all those disappearing days on previous holidays.
Sherry, who now had John's number, moved quickly to the subject of the rest room at the back of the bus. Bodily functions are a crucial part of coach touring. The door is never locked, she assured us. "But how do I put this without being indelicate? We are going into the hinterland where there are not too many 'dump' stations."
We left Denver and drove north into a land of rock and pine. It was Western scenery, mapped with Western names— canyons, creeks and gulches; Wyoming and Cheyenne. We diverted to our first national park, Rocky Mountain, on the highest major highway in the States. Trail Ridge Road climbs way above the tree line to a tundra plateau, cropped threadbare by the wind.
At more than 12,000ft you are eye level with great peaks of whittled granite, their sheltered eastern flanks wrapped in the ermine of snow. The Indians called them the "mountains of never summer". There was some question whether, even in June, the road would be open. "They have two seasons here," said Sherry. "Winter and construction."
You cover a lot of ground on a bus tour— 3,124 miles on ours— and there was a competition at the end to guess how far. Stan won. He was only two miles out. He was one of the quieter passengers. "Who's Stan?" someone asked.
We followed straight roads across the Great Plains, an ocean of grassland the colour of lichen, and bending roads through the Black Hills of South Dakota, lumpy landscape darkened by forests of ponderosa pine. There were curiosities: in the cavalry barracks at Fort Laramie, the restored trading post and garrison on the Oregon Trail, each of the seven dining tables is set with a 19th-century bottle of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce.
There were monstrosities. The figure of the Sioux chief, Crazy Horse, being sculpted with dynamite on a South Dakota mountain top is a piece of monumental kitsch in the making.
It will be big enough to contain the heads of all four presidents at nearby Mount Rushmore. There we witnessed a moment of pure Americana at the nightly light show. It culminates in the reverential lowering of the Stars and Stripes and its ritual and symbolic folding. "Well, if they haven't got a Queen, at least they've got a flag," Bill, an ex-colonial policeman, observed sagely.
We saw wolves, in captivity, at Yellowstone National Park, although they have been re-established there in the wild; we saw condors soaring above the Grand Canyon where they have been reintroduced. We gorged ourselves on the unending and ever-changing red rock landscape.
For days the journey ran through the big-screen scenery of an extended movie set. North by Northwest was filmed at Mount Rushmore; Dances with Wolves near Deadwood. Dates there are given as BC or AC— before or after Costner.
The Western may be experiencing a comeback, but in Wyoming towns such as Sheridan, Cody and Jackson— where they stage hourly gunfights on Main Street— they never knew it had left.
Five days out and our labels' polarity was reversed. Now they were little magnets, emblems of our bonding. The process was helped by our changing bus seats: every day we moved two rows clockwise and had new companions across the aisle.
There were shared adventures such as the power cut in Yellowstone, which blacked out all the restaurants; the queues for breakfast; and our forays into supermarkets the size of small municipalities to buy our picnics. The tour doesn't include meals.
Each morning we inquired about Caroline's back and Dave's swollen toe and exchanged boasts of the grotesque size of our steaks the night before. Not Sam and Gill, though; they were vegetarian. But they said they had eaten better than they expected. In Moab, Utah, the competition was for who had found the worst restaurant.
We were a group that was happy to be shown places rather than having to find them for ourselves; happy to be taken rather than having to go. We went with the flow. After one stop I got on the wrong bus. Only when I realised I was with a party of puzzled Italians did I twig. We got on with our companions. We had to: there are few other holidays where you spend so much time in such close proximity. Jennifer said she had never seen so much handholding.
We took pride in being on time, in having our wake-up call at 6am; our bags outside our rooms at seven and being on the bus by eight. "Six, seven, eight," said Sherry. "If every other tour director on the road wasn't saying the same thing I'd feel bad about it. But they are, so I don't." It snowed in Yellowstone and the bison looked grumpier than ever.
By the time we got to Phoenix we'd be wilting in temperatures of 43C (109F). We drove through the alpine valley of the Snake River and then past a succession of little Mormon farming settlements, each with its population recorded on its sign. "Don't-blink towns," Sherry called them: Etna (pop 200), Thayne (341), Grover (120) and Smoot (100).
In Salt Lake City, headquarters of the Mormon Church, a church led by divine revelation, a guide told us that Gordon B Hinckley, the Prophet, and his 12 apostles were at work in the 28-storey office building. I imagined them fielding revelations the way the rest of us deal with email. Bill strode into the Tabernacle and announced: "I've brought a group of Devil worshippers." The Sisters at the door giggled with delight.
When we left Yellowstone people said they had enjoyed it, but where was the "wow" factor? No one said that about Bryce Canyon. Bryce looks as if it has been uncovered, a gargantuan cave where the roof has been removed to expose a deep valley bristling with stalagmites.
Except these are sandstone, not limestone turrets and spires, tinted with every shade from the red spectrum. Marion is asthmatic but, by pumping away at her inhaler, bravely made it to the highest viewpoint. "How can the Grand Canyon possibly be better than this?" she wondered.
David, from Yorkshire, not easily impressed by anything to which you can't pin a white rose, gazed at the "grottoes", vast niches bitten out of the canyon wall. "It's like entering a cathedral," he allowed. "Rievaulx Abbey or somewhere." The national park is the apogee of American culture.
Forget jazz and Hollywood and the knickerbocker glory, the national park system is a treasure that grows more valuable with every passing year. It began with Yellowstone in 1872 in an act of extraordinary prescience. Not only is Yellowstone older than the three states that contain it, but it was the first national park in the world.
After a day gazing at pristine wilderness you can forget there is anything else. Reality slaps as soon as you exit the park gate. Within yards you are immersed in the huckstering neon and gimcrack architecture of small-town America. It's not just elk and pine trees that find sanctuary in a park like Yellowstone, but us— three million a year in Yellowstone alone.
And what about a bus as a way of experiencing it? For the short-term visitor, and compared with a car, it makes a lot of sense, not just as a way of reducing 40-odd people's carbon footprints.
A bus tour takes you straight to the areas of greatest interest and you have the benefit of a "step-on", expert local guide. The bus itself, with its height and huge windows, is a vantage point and with all those pairs of eyes on the lookout you don't miss a squirrel, let alone a bison. Plus we had Sherry to enlighten us on everything from interstate highways to Paris Hilton.
At the airport she gave us maps on which she had marked the route to remind us where we'd been. It was a gesture of typical generosity, although the itinerary was only the half of it. Group we may have been, but actually the journey had been different for each of us.
- Peter Hughes travelled with Titan HiTours (0800 988 5858, http://www.titanhitours.co.uk). The 17-day National Parks tour costs from £1,775 per person with 23 departures provisionally planned between May and September 2008 and in May 2009. The price includes door-to-door transport between home and Heathrow, scheduled flights, taxes, 15 nights' hotel accommodation and national park entry fees.
- Guidebook: US National Parks West (Insight Guides, £16.99)
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