Friday, April 9, 2010

Hotel Bus in Germany

This bus owned by a German tour company features a six-foot-long bed for each of its passengers. The company claims to operate some 3400 "beds on wheels." Want to see Africa lying down?

Hotel buses of course have a bathroom but no shower. Each bunk is about three feet wide and three feet high; you enter it through a zippered curtain. And the cabin is patented, so no, you can't steal the idea.

The company is called Rotel Tours (the word is a portmanteau of "rolling" and "hotel") and it has been hosting bus-bed tours of Europe, Asia, and Africa since 1959. It was founded in 1945 by a man named George Hötel. His firm's buses cater almost exclusively to German tourists; in the past fifty years, they have done everything from crossing the Sahara desert to traversing Mongolia and Vietnam.


































































Photo Credit: Rotel, Adam E. Moreira/Wikipedia, Orbisnonsuficit/Flickr