More For Less / Budget Travel Green Tortoise Bus Is A Different Sort Of Animal

Green Tortoise Adventure Travel buses take their time getting places. Nevertheless, this company has come a long way in its 25-year lifetime.

In 1974, founder Gardner Kent drove a busload of friends from San Francisco to Boston in an old green schoolbus.

Since then, the Green Tortoise has evolved from a counterculture bus line to a premier purveyor of adventurous, budget tours. With its current fleet of 13 buses, the Tortoise offers 18 tours featuring such diverse destinations as Yellowstone National Park, Baja California, Alaska and Costa Rica.

Plying routes chosen for their natural splendor, the Green Tortoise Adventure Travel Co. (494 Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133; phone 800-867-8647 or 415-956-7500; www.greentortoise.com) bills itself as a "hostel on wheels," providing not only transport, but also food and space for sleeping.

For travelers with tight finances, extra time and a craving for camaraderie, the Tortoise is ideal. It also helps if passengers are well-versed in the ethics of "Sesame Street" and "Captain Kangaroo." If you can't cooperate, Tortoise travel is not for you. (In Seattle, the Green Tortoise Backpacker's Hostel is at 1525 Second Ave., phone 206-340-1222).

In the Tortoise's brand of communalism, passengers ride together, sleep together, cook together and rinse off road grime together in lakes and rivers along the way.

Consequently, the company is often labeled a "hippie bus," which rankles Tortoise management. But the label is hard to shake since:

-- Tortoise buses are green and bear the slogan "The Only Trip of Its Kind."

-- Their seats have been ripped out, replaced by earthy, wood-trimmed couches, booths and bunks.

-- Occasionally, when a Tortoise bus swings into a truck stop for a bathroom break, disgorging 40 Birkenstock-shod passengers, a trucker will be heard to ask, "What in the hell is that?" And another trucker, pushing up his gimme-cap, will be heard to answer, "Looks to me like a free-for-all, love-in type of thing."

I heard that very exchange a few years ago while on a Green Tortoise journey from Seattle to Los Angeles. But my fellow travelers weren't hippies. They were just normal folks, looking for a cheaper, more interesting way to travel down the West Coast than taking a plane or boarding a Greyhound Americruiser.

The journey, costing $79, took two days. On the afternoon of the first day, near Grants Pass, Ore., we pulled off the highway into the Tortoise's private, forested rest stop. Some of the passengers stripped to their altogether for a sauna, others went for a swim in Cow Creek. Afterward, everybody sat down to a feast of salad and pasta.

Moveable slumber party

While we ate, the driver performed the "miracle," unfolding the bus's couches and booths into beds. Back on the bus, while rumbling through Oregon and Northern California, I slept on the large, window-to-window platform in the rear. That's where I spent the following night, too, before arriving in Los Angeles. On both nights, there was a dozen of us back there, stretched out side by side like pre-teens at a slumber party.

Though memorable, this West Coast "commuter trip" provided just a quick taste of the Tortoise. It hardly compared in ambition or adventure to the Tortoise's cross-country journeys.

The Sunny Southern Route, which goes from Boston to San Francisco and vice versa, takes about two weeks and costs $349. Passengers also chip in $111 for food, for a total cost of $460, not a bad price for a two-week road trip including stops at the Okefenokee swamp, New Orleans, Big Bend National Park, Mexican border towns, Bryce and Zion National Parks and Las Vegas.

Still not adventurous enough for you?

The Tortoise also has a 16-day whale-watching trip to Baja, California ($640, including food); the Southern Migration, a 23-day journey from San Francisco to Antigua, Guatemala ($900); and a 28-day, $1,750 journey from San Francisco to Anchorage, Alaska, which includes return airfare. There are also shorter trips to Yosemite, the deserts of the Southwest, the Grand Canyon and northern California, all originating in San Francisco.

If 28 days sounds like a long time to spend on a bus in close, redolent quarters with your fellow passengers, be assured that passengers spend many of their waking hours off the bus, hiking, climbing, rafting, soaking in hot springs or staring into campfires.

The bulk of the driving is done at night, while passengers comfortably snooze in the Tortoise's bunks or rear platform. This arrangement has proved remarkably successful - the Tortoise carries more than 15,000 passengers every year.

This may be small change compared with all the passengers who take Greyhound, but the Tortoise is, well, a different animal.

When my own trip on the Green Tortoise ended and I got off in downtown L.A., the bus pulled away and everybody still on board waved good-bye. I doubt that happens very often on Greyhound. ------------------------------- David Gonazales' column on budget travel runs monthly in Travel.