Innocents Abroad / THE SEQUEL : In 1867, young Mark Twain recorded his impressions of what has become a rite of passage: the Grand tour of Europe. Here’s how it’s done in 1993.

A great city flashes past outside our bus windows. A ton of baggage shifts and settles in the compartment beneath our feet. We sit elbow to elbow, 51 tourists in 52 seats, peering out at the corner pubs, the drivers on the wrong side of the road, the grounds of Buckingham Palace. . . .

“The Kings!” shouts 24-year-old Shannon Savala as we round a corner by the palace gates. But she is looking the other way.

“The Kings lost in overtime,” she continues. “It was horrible!”

She is from Villa Park, Calif., she is talking about the last hockey score she heard from home, and this is a clue. Most of the passengers on this tour bus are young Americans, still swimming in their own culture, but come to gather their first glimpses of Europe. Aboard we have six voluble and intrepid young women from Southern California, 23 less voluble and less intrepid law students from Valparaiso University in Indiana, two teachers from Missouri, a postal worker from Pittsburgh, 19 others from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and Japan, and me, the reporter who has come to gather glimpses of the Americans gathering glimpses.

This is the trip of their lives. Two of the Orange County crew, each just graduated from college, have been scheming to make this journey since 10th grade. One of the Missouri teachers, 27-year-old Cindy Anderson, is following through on daydreams that began in her first high school French class, when she imagined being kissed beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

At the head of the aisle stands tour manager Amanda Gardiner, a slim 29-year-old with an Australian accent and a microphone at her chin. For most of the last four years, she has been shepherding young travelers across the Continent on tours with Contiki Travel Europe. Gardiner first welcomes us, then warns us.

“You are not going to get to see everything,” she says. “This tour is a matter of choices. This is what we call our appetizer of Europe.”

It’s a crowded plate, and it will be hurled at us. In the next 12 days, this bus will cross England, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France--eight countries, if you count the Vatican. The package price: $1,195, double occupancy, not including air fare.

Among other things, this journey is a measure of how far Western Civilization has come from the 19th-Century days of steamships and Grand Tours. In 1867, when a young journalist followed several dozen Americans on the first organized pleasure tour from the New World to the Old, the trip was a six-month enterprise that cost $1,250 per person, and delivered its takers to deeply unfamiliar places.

“The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant,” wrote Mark Twain upon his return. “They looked curiously at the customs we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at the table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses, and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris, they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

Twain’s account of the trip became his first book, “The Innocents Abroad,” and launched him toward international fame.

So much for ancient history. The explorers here on Contiki Tour HP 311 are young in a new time. Twain, at 32 years of age, was 20 years younger than most of his fellow travelers. I, at the same age as Twain, am a decade beyond most of those aboard the bus. They come from the first generation of travelers with CNN to prepare them, jumbo jets to deliver them, McDonald’s and the Hard Rock Cafe to comfort them, and no Iron Curtain to impede them. Surely, their Europe will be like no one else’s.

Southbound on the bus. Eagles harmonizing on the sound system. Narrow streets give way to the broad green meadows of the English countryside. Ahead, a ferry will carry us across the English Channel on our way toward Amsterdam.

The day begins at 6:30 in the parking lot of London’s Royal National Hotel, when driver David Hook pulled open the various hatches and doors of bus 9101, and four-dozen groggy adventurers in T-shirts and shorts climbed in clutching complimentary rainbow-colored Contiki knapsacks. Now, several hours down the road, the women of the Orange County gang are flirting with Hook (another 29-year-old Australian) and comparing impressions of London.

“There are so many people walking around,” says Shannon Savala’s 22-year-old sister, Kelley. “It’s like New York. And so many buses.”

She and the others arrived in London a few days early, picnicked at Hyde Park, browsed Harrods, and took in a heaping helping of night life. They drank at a pub on Regent Street, and danced at a Piccadilly Circus disco called the Hippodrome, stumbled into and out of a gay bar near Leicester Square. They also took a tour of famous London murder scenes. Amid much happy chatter about Jack the Ripper and his technique, a souvenir book of grisly photographs is handed from seat to seat.

“Europe is what you do when you graduate,” says Cheri Piest, 22, of Anaheim, who just finished a bachelor’s degree in marketing at Cal State Fullerton. “You go for a long time and enjoy it, because you might not ever go back.” In Paris, near the end of this tour, Piest will hook up with her mother and extend her trip with further adventures in France.

A few minutes later and two rows back, Kiran Mehta of Australia turns to me with a question.

“Why,” she whispers, “are Americans so loud?”

This stumps me, until I remember that there are two dozen quiet Americans seated behind her--the Indiana law students. I am among them an hour or so later, when we draw near the famous White Cliffs of Dover, and find Dover Castle looking down from a blufftop to green hills and several dozen grazing sheep. One of the quiet Americans points out her window.

“That,” says Tricia Taylor, 23, of Merrillville, Ind., “would make a cool picture.”

She and her seatmate, 22-year-old Mike Bellich, also of Merrillville, have just finished their first year of law school. After this trip, they will spend six weeks at Cambridge in a summer study program. About a week from now, writing in her journal, Taylor will interrupt her tales of discovery and excitement to make the following list of things she misses.

“Shower curtains. Taco Bells. Free bathrooms. Ice. Soft toilet paper. Garbage cans in bathrooms. Drinking fountains. Newspapers in English. Efficiency and quick service. Mom.”

Now we’re in the Dutch countryside. The landscape outside is still green, but gentle hills have been replaced by severe plains, windmills rising here and there. Gardiner briefs us on the Netherlands--constitutional monarchy, social tolerance, canals, beer foam two fingers deep--and reminds us that a diamond factory tour is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Then she is interrupted by a burst of murmuring in the bus. On the banks of a lake to the right, several dozen bathers lie naked. Amsterdam--tour guides call it “Amsterdamage”--must be near.

The Orange County contingent has settled on three objectives for the following day, which Shanna Crabtree now carries scribbled on a scrap of paper: Anne Frank House. Sex Museum. The Medieval Torture Museum.

“We’re not really into diamonds,” explains 22-year-old dental assistant Leigh Anne Gonzales.

The architecture is priceless, the canals ingenious, the museums impressive. But it’s the red-light district that stops young people in their tracks. Here, marijuana is peddled, rolled and inhaled freely in coffeehouses. Prostitution is legal, and doorways and picture windows are crawling with women in exotic underwear.

After 12 hours on the road, we pile out of the bus and into a clean, spare suburban hotel. And over dinner, I make a decision: I am not going to follow the explorations of the Orange County gang this evening. Granted, Amanda Gardiner, whose tour managing experience has included more than a few busloads of burly, beer-soaked 20-year-olds, has already pegged them and the rest of HP 311 as a respectable, relatively low-maintenance group. But on a free night in Europe’s most notorious red-light district, common sense tells me to hang with the law students.

And they lead me to a live sex show.

There are 13 of us. We pay a cover charge of about $25 each and are forced to sit in the front three rows. Loud music. Women. Men. Men and women. A man, alone, in an ape suit. A banana. And Jen Markavitch--one of us--being coaxed on stage to help a man unfasten his leather chaps. She escapes the stage while his G-string is still in place.

Afterward, the group is not quite proud, but not quite embarrassed, either.

The Orange County contingent straggles home later. But the next morning, the women are energetic enough to skip out on the diamond tour, chase down a passing street car, and beat a path to the house where young Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II. On the way, Shanna Crabtree notices a brass-lettered sign identifying Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, and wonders aloud:

“Is that a whorehouse, you guys?”

The question dies. And once we enter the museum, the group turns quiet. For half an hour, the six peer at photographs of occupied Amsterdam, climb the stairs to the Frank family’s hidden compartment, marvel at the yellowed movie-star clippings still affixed to the wall in Anne’s room, scan a passage from Anne Frank’s diary.

Mindy Olsen, a 23-year-old nursing student from San Diego State, buys a book for her boyfriend. Kelley Savala muses over the time the Frank family spent in hiding before being discovered.

“Two years,” she says. “And eight people lived here!”

“Solemnity, decorum, dinner, dominoes, devotions, slander,” wrote Mark Twain those many years ago, enumerating his crowd’s shipboard routine. “If we only had a corpse it would have made a noble funeral excursion.”

We have little decorum, no dominoes and Madonna on the stereo, which no one should confuse with devotions. We’re in Germany now, and life on the bus has settled into a streamlined set of rituals. There are many nappers, a few readers of John Grisham and Barbara Taylor Bradford, a rummy game, and many tellings and retellings of the previous day’s discoveries.

Law student Michael Faehner details his visit to the Amsterdam Hard Rock Cafe with a trace of disappointment: “It was like any other pub,” he laments. “And it didn’t have any memorabilia.”

Others are quieter about their adventures. In the basement of a bar called the Grasshopper, half a dozen or more of the HP 311’s ranks purchased and huddled over hefty marijuana cigarettes. Those travelers now repose peacefully in their seats, daydreaming as the scenery rolls by. (Amanda Gardiner has been careful to point out that Contiki Tours doesn’t endorse this type of thing, but no young person’s tour could easily avoid it.)

The stereo thumps. The air-conditioning unit hums, and our two doors stand ready for hasty entrances and exits. (Lacking a bathroom, we make rest stops every three hours or so.) The tour has hit its rhythm. For the next week, through Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland, the voyagers of HP 311 accumulate experiences like a railroad taking on heavy freight. But they never slow down.

At St. Goar, a picturesque tourist town on the Rhine River, there’s a wine-tasting party, and a visit to a medieval castle.

In Munich, under rain and hail, the travelers stare up at the revolving figures of the Glockenspiel--the town hall’s musical moving clock--and walk amid throngs in the busy Marienplatz area. That night, Gardiner leads them to a massive beer hall, where there is much drinking, talking and singing. A young German tells law student Helen Contos that he likes Americans because they don’t blame him for the Nazis’ actions in World War II. Many Europeans do seem to, he says, and “it saddens my heart.”

A German soccer fan orders Tricia to sing the Indiana University football team’s fight song. An old man offers Julie Downing a cash reward for being a “cute American,” no obligations attached. Scott Lipke gets separated from the group, and straggles in around dawn without his glasses. He recalls little, “except walking down the hallway of what appeared to be a school.”

In Rome, the women bristle at being appraised constantly by local men. But spirits remain high. In the bus one night, a dancing free-for-all develops in the narrow aisle, followed by a discordant rendition of “We Are the World.”

At every stop, the travelers careen from the novel to the familiar and back again. Shanna Crabtree and company discover an affordable pizzeria near the Piazza Navona in Rome, then take their next meal at McDonald’s.

Social patterns hold. The Californians speak more freely, follow the schedule less closely, pay less attention to the historical background offered by local guides, and charge into uncharted territory at most every opportunity. The Indianans, for the most part, stick to the program.

In Florence, the group misses out on the world-renowned Uffizi Gallery--closed in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing--and gathers for an official tour photo: four rows of young travelers, all sunglasses, shorts and lettered T-shirts, grinning amid a panorama of red-tiled roofs, the city’s emblematic Duomo rising behind them.

In Lucerne, Switzerland, the group rides a tram to the top of Mt. Pilatus. Mike Bellich, celebrating his 23rd birthday, is given chocolates by an old lady. Cindy Anderson dines on the mountaintop. Then, thinking of Maria in “The Sound of Music,” she runs outside and sings the opening lines of “Edelweiss.” Her voice echoes down the valley.

Late afternoon in Paris. Thick clouds overhead, thick traffic in the grand boulevards on all sides. This is Day 12, and the last city that the adventurers of HP 311 will see before returning to London and going their various ways.

The lobby door of the Hotel Arcade Bastille swings open, and Shanna Crabtree shuffles in, luggage in tow.

“I’m in pain,” she moans. The rest of the rumpled crew looks about the same, slouching through a set of all-too-familiar motions. Drag in bags. Grab room key from counter. Locate elevator. Ascend. Freshen up for perhaps an hour. Then reassemble for dinner.

Leigh Anne Gonzales wears a new T-shirt emblazoned with the Florence city seal. Tricia Taylor carries in her luggage two bracelets, a gold ring, two purses and lace, all acquired in Italy. And Liza van der Merwe of South Africa and Chris Koenig of Indiana now seem to be a couple--the only couple to unite on the tour and remain attached publicly for more than a day or two.

Three hours later, we’re all boarding the bus again, this time for the nighttime tour of the city. Amanda Gardiner is talking about Celts and Huns when we round a corner and an enormous anomaly in the skyline sends whispers rippling through the coach. The Eiffel Tower.

Standing below the 1,040-foot, 12,000-ton tower, the first-timers agree that it is bigger, a lot bigger, than they expected. Law student Melissa Massier looks giddy just standing in line for the elevator.

At the top, an Australian policeman from our group named Scott dawdles outside in the cold air. Just as his girlfriend, Karen, is about to curse him for moving so slowly, he produces a ring and proposes marriage. She says yes. Back on board the bus, Amanda Gardiner announces the engagement. The coach resounds with applause.

Amanda Gardiner has started thinking about her next assignment. When this trip ends tomorrow, she will have three days to rest. Then she embarks on a 28-day tour with a new batch of travelers.

“I wish I could have this group for 28 days,” she says. “You get some people on these tours who just want to drink in every bar in Europe . . . You get some groups, halfway through the day, asking if they can just go back to the hotel. ‘That’s fine,’ I always tell them, ‘but you’re in Paris .’ ”

So we are. And today we have the afternoon free. It’s essentially an impossible situation--less than five hours to take measure of a city that has stood for a millennium--but it must be faced.

The group scatters. Several spurn the Louvre, having heard of dark, crowded halls, and spend much of their afternoon at the Musee d’Orsay, an airy former train station on the Seine that in 1986 took over the city’s top collection of Impressionist paintings.

Cindy Anderson, who dreamed of being kissed under the Arc de Triomphe, now heads for that very spot. There, Anderson and her companion Julie Downing find a group of American soldiers. Talks are initiated. Time passes. And before long, Anderson is standing at her chosen location, receiving a not unpleasant kiss from a not unattractive young soldier.

Mike Bellich, Tricia Taylor and four others from Indiana have a longer list of destinations. With me trailing, they set out on foot.

At 12:40 we duck into American Express to replenish finances, admiring the ornate facade of the neighboring Paris Opera building as we go. Then lunch at McDonald’s.

“Oh, no way,” objects Chris Becker, one of the law students. “I didn’t come to Paris to eat at McDonald’s.”

While the others file in for burgers and Coke and French fries, he huffs off to search unsuccessfully for a gift bottle of wine. United again, we make our way to the Hard Rock Cafe, buy T-shirts (but no food), then head for the Louvre. At 2:15 we descend beneath I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid and enter the Louvre, and follow the signs to “La Joconde” --the “Mona Lisa.” On our way, we shoulder through masses of tourists, and see several more collapsed and sleeping on museum benches. At 2:18, we find the “Mona Lisa,” protected by bullet-proof glass, surrounded as usual.

Indianan Tim DeGroote has been warned about this particular European experience. But even so, he says, “You know, I did think it was gonna be bigger.”

We’re out of the museum in just under an hour. On the way to the Arc de Triomphe, we stop on the Champs Elysees to snack at a Burger King. Chris Becker again declines to enter.

We reach the base of the arch at 5 p.m. But the gang is tired from the walk, and dinner is only a few hours off. They decide to head back to the hotel, and file down a stairwell to the subway. Chris Becker, determined to see the view from atop the arch, will have none of this. He presses on without his classmates, and he is rewarded.

Today, as it happens, is June 18, the anniversary of a key World War II speech in which French leader Charles DeGaulle called for resistance against the occupying Germans. Dozens of uniformed old men, whom we scarcely noticed in the sidewalk crowds, now draw together. While Becker watches from the top of the arch and strains of military music begin, the old men fall into parade formation and march.

“These were the people who had battled the Nazis years before,” Becker says later. “And they were proudly wearing their medals and carrying their flags with a band and honor guard. It was a wonderful scene.”

The last dinner is reserved at a Left Bank restaurant called the Relais Odeon. The establishment is decorated in 1900 art nouveau style and its atmosphere here, Contiki’s brochure assures us, is “just what you’d expect to find in Paris’ famous Quartier Latin .”

Maybe on other nights it is, but not this evening.

Forty-one of us gather in the bistro--the other 10 have made various other plans--and even before we can begin to sift through our travel memories, the evening veers out of control. What began groggily two weeks ago in a London parking lot will end here, in humidity and delirium.

Without pausing to attempt French, the head waiter barks out choices in English: “Salad, soup or snails. Beef, veal, salmon or duck.” He whoops to get our attention, hollers when we pause in ordering and with theatrical playfulness, he refuses special orders. He also keeps the alcohol coming--red and white wine, shots of cognac between courses, then more wine. The room, which we share with another large and boisterous Contiki party, gets warmer and warmer.

One of the law students, ordinarily painfully shy, swallows a snail, downs a shot of cognac, and starts flitting from table to table, working the room.

“Hey,” she says, “you only live once.”

Even Keiko Nagao of Japan, another shy one, is cutting loose in her own way. Concentrating carefully in the tumult, she folds and refolds a stray piece of paper, and comes up with a duck. As another toast is proposed, she places the elegant origami bird in paddling posture atop an empty wine bottle.

It’s hard to say exactly what the adventurers of HP 311 came looking for, but they’ve found plenty: sex, drugs, landmarks and monuments, terrorist rubble, young soldiers, old soldiers, a selection of souvenir T-shirts probably unprecedented in history. Perhaps they can’t recite the history of Western Civilization, but they’ve glimpsed its outline.

Cindy Anderson has filled a journal, averaging three exclamation marks for every two pages. Michael Bellich has declared “absolutely no complaints” over any aspect of the journey.

And Shannon Savala, whom now I see raising her glass yet again, seems to have forgotten all about her Kings and that painful overtime defeat. It’s time to pronounce ourselves a success, and come on home.

GUIDEBOOK

A Quick Tour of the Quick Tours

There are many tour operators who target travelers in their late teens and 20s. Typically, they supply fast-paced tours that rely on buses for transportation between countries and offer more free time than school-sponsored trips do.

Prospective travelers should ask about the company’s background and how it protects customers’ deposit money. Other subjects to raise: Is trip cancellation insurance available? Can the tour operator put you in touch with past customers? Who is the average customer? Are itinerary details, such as names of hotels, available well in advance?

Here’s a sampling of three experienced operators in the young person’s tour market:

AESU Travel, 2 Hamill Road, Suite 248, Baltimore, Md. 21210-1807; telephone (800) 638-7640. Founded in 1977, AESU specializes in escorted European hotel tours for 18- to 35-year-olds, and also handles some high school tours, corporate programs and specialty groups. Spokesman Gerry Nagatani said the company sends about 3,000 travelers to Europe each year, most of them aged 22-24 and making their first trip. Popular tour: “The Great Escape,” a 25-day, 11-country summer bus journey that starts in London and ends in Athens. Next summer’s price will not be available until October. This summer’s price was $1,957 per person, double occupancy, excluding air fare. Sold directly and through travel agents.

Contiki Holidays, 1432 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim 92805; tel. (800) 466-0610. Contiki serves travelers 18-35, offering escorted tours to destinations including Europe, the United States and the South Pacific. Clientele is international, and on European trips Americans are often outnumbered by Australians. Travel professionals know Contiki as the “party” tour operator, with less academic emphasis than some of its competitors. Founded in 1961 by New Zealander John Anderson, Contiki in 1989 was acquired by a holding company that also controls Trafalgar Tours. Richard Launder, president of Contiki Holidays USA, estimates that the company annually books 50,000 people worldwide, of whom substantially fewer than 10,000 are Americans, though their numbers are growing. Popular tour: “European Discovery,” a 15-day bus tour through eight countries. Price: $1,085-$1,195 (depending on the time of year), double occupancy, excluding air fare. Sold only through travel agents.

Club Europa, 802 W. Oregon St., Urbana, Ill. 61801; tel. (800) 331-1882. Founded in 1959, this company aims for travelers 18-34, and sends 80% of its trips to Europe. (The others go to East Africa, Asia and Australia.) Director of North American operations Pamela Hill estimates that the company booked 2,000-3,000 travelers to Europe last year. That same year, Club Europa founder Roland Stemmler sold the company to Andy Benz of Vienna (who had been director of the company’s European operations for more than 15 years) and his Florida-based partner, Dr. Adolph Schmidt. Popular tour: “The Classic,” a 36-day tour that begins in London, passes through Paris, Amsterdam, Heidelberg, Lucerne, Innsbruck, Munich, Vienna, Venice, Nice, Florence, Rome, Delphi, Hydra, and ends in Athens. Price: $2,568 in 1993, double or triple occupancy, air fare excluded. Sold directly and through travel agents.

A popular source for advice on these and other tours is Council Travel, which specializes in student and budget travel and operates 47 travel agency offices nationwide, including operations in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Sherman Oaks, San Diego and Santa Barbara. (Warning: Council Travel offices tend to be very busy in summer, leaving agents little time for leisurely phone conversations.)

--C.R.