On a Bus, Seeing L.A. Through a Tourist’s Eyes : Civic boosters say the travel business is strong, but some entrepreneurs disagree. As for visitors themselves, many don’t quite know what to think of the metropolis.

Forty minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the tour bus is now crawling into Hollywood. The driver, who is chipper beyond reason, calls our attention to a distant hillside nearly hidden in a white haze.

Peeping in and out behind sections of sound wall and palm trees and buildings is a row of faint block letters the size of the print in the phone book: the Hollywood sign.

Anne Cook of Charlotte, N.C., on her first visit to L.A., stands and cranes her neck, trying to find it. She can’t. The driver rattles on about the history of Tinseltown. Anne sits, stands again, looks desperate. She sits, fidgets. She stands and does a contortion.

Finally, as the bus rumbles through a curve onto Sunset Boulevard, she catches a quick glimpse, a few seconds that will have to last her a lifetime.

“It took me a while,” the retired bookkeeper admits sheepishly.

I am sitting behind her. I am rolling through the miles, rolling past signs, towers, billboards, boutiques, bars--the whole sprawling mess, trying to make some sense of the summer tourist season. Trying to find closure.

The reports I’m hearing, as Labor Day brings down the curtain, are, to say the least, conflicting. On one hand the jubilant pronouncements of the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau: Tourism is up, hotels are hopping, millions of people are dumping billions of dollars here. Things have never been better.

From tour operators and souvenir vendors comes a darker assessment. Traffic is down, they say. Way down. The Japanese aren’t coming. The Germans aren’t coming. Revenues have fallen like a Malibu hillside.

I cannot solve the puzzle, but I can go to the source, see what these tourists are thinking. See the city through their eyes, and I will understand why they are coming--or staying away. And so with some awkwardness I sidle up to them on the bus.

They give me the kind of hard looks you’d give a bug on the windshield. But when I explain what I want, they wet their lips. They have spent thousands on air fare, rooms, meals, Disneyland passes, tour tickets and whatever else, and they are all too happy to tell me what they think.

How do they like Los Angeles?

“I don’t,” declares Angela Barbour, a university lecturer from the leafy expanses of Adelaide, Australia. “The freeways are ugly. I’m sure there are some nice areas, like Beverly Hills. But I haven’t seen them.”

L.A. is “a cement jungle,” says another Australian, Peter Stagg. “It ain’t what you see on TV.”

The city is bad enough, but even out in the suburbs all the homes are packed together, observes Peggy Love, a member of the small Charlotte contingent. She has been here barely a day and talks like an acute claustrophobic. She stares through the window at the midday sidewalk hordes on Hollywood Boulevard: “It’s 11 o’clock and all these people are out on the street. Why aren’t they working?”

This is an all-day tour, a $42-per-passenger junket that affords one of the widest cross-sections of the region. It starts in Anaheim, moves up the freeway to downtown Los Angeles, spins through Hollywood, out the Sunset Strip, down Rodeo Drive and on to the Santa Monica Pier and Third Street Promenade. There are three stops, including lunch and an hour or so at the beach. Bus driver Ronnie Bell maintains a tireless narrative.

Like other commercial tours, this one bypasses the vast swath of South-Central and East Los Angeles, as well as the hundreds of square miles of the San Fernando Valley, which might as well be the surface of Neptune.

“L.A. is so massive,” marvels Clive Adkin, who has come to appreciate the city almost in spite of itself. This is the final stop for him, his wife, Sonia, and son Mark on a two-week holiday that included San Francisco and Yosemite. The London residents could relate to San Francisco--a city built “on a European model; you can walk around it”--and they found Yosemite “brilliant.”

Los Angeles is, well, interesting.

They stare at the Library Tower, City Hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The bus leaves downtown in the rearview mirror.

“The center is really quite small,” Clive says.

In Hollywood the bus stops at Mann’s Chinese. Anne Cook hurries off to look for Clark Gable’s handprint in the concrete. Her mother was a huge Gable fan. On the way to find Gable she runs across Bing Crosby, Roy Rogers and Trigger.

The tourists push through Hollywood Souvenirs, a cluttered shop with Marilyn T-shirts and refrigerator-magnet Oscars. Owner Batia Zahavi says trade is down 20% this year. Why, no one knows, but there are theories: Disneyland is remodeling. The dollar is strong, and therefore travel is more expensive for foreign visitors. But even domestic tourism is off.

“It’s very, very much down,” Zahavi says.

As we move outside, a derelict is against the wall, surrounded by cops. They are arresting him. Sherry Yarbrough, a member of the Charlotte group, wishes she would see more such excitement.

“I was expecting to see more body piercings,” she says as the bus departs with us again. “I was expecting that part of Hollywood to be more sleazy.”

Sherry likes watching the people more than seeing the sights.

L.A. has the trendsetters, the golden girls, an undeniable mystique. Yet there is some fear in coming here. “There’s no way you can think about L.A. without thinking of all the news: the gangs and crime,” Sherry says. “It’s really strange: You can have all the beauty and peace and wealth in some parts of the city and [problems] in others. It’s like two different worlds.”

In Search of the ‘Beautiful People’

We glide along the Sunset Strip: Tower Records, the Whisky, the Viper Room. Actor River Phoenix collapsed and died right there on the sidewalk. Down Rodeo Drive: Gucci, Giorgio, Van Cleef & Arpels. Sherry eyes the foot traffic: women with cameras, paunchy men in walking shorts.

“All these people are obviously tourists,” she says. “Where are the beautiful people?”

Lunch is at the Hard Rock. Then out the gray freeway to the beach, strolling the pier, sun and mild breezes. The tourists stop along the rail and gaze down the bluffs toward Malibu.

“I can’t believe that beach,” Peggy says.

“Really gorgeous,” says Sherry.

Maybe the crowds these days jam the beach towns rather than the inland tourist traps. But my thesis is thin, so I go home, brood, and embark on another tour in the morning, a four-hour venture that begins at Farmers Market.

This one stops downtown at Olvera Street, site of the city’s oldest home, the Avila Adobe. It was built 181 years ago and, frankly, looks it.

Enzo Grosso, from Italy, might see it as new construction.

“We have buildings 2,000 years old,” he says, laughing.

Tourism in these places is down. But I meet nice people. Wendy Kelly has brought her mom, Jean Shellcot, from Australia. Lisa Navis flew in from Albany, N.Y., rented a car and returned it as soon as she pulled up at the Century Plaza.

“I’ve driven in New York City, I’ve driven in Boston,” she says. “I will not drive here.”

We reach Mann’s Chinese and see a Michael Jackson look-alike. We angle down the Strip. Through a restaurant window we make a celebrity sighting: Fabio, talking on a cell phone. We see umpteen places where movies and TV shows were shot.

But the answers I’m after are impossible to grasp. The interlopers who slip into Los Angeles for only a day or two, or a week or two, find enough to hold them, briefly. Just nothing to shout about.

“So far it’s been lovely,” says Carol Crisp, another Australian, as if searching for positives. “The people are so polite I can’t believe it.” And the mansions: “Magnificent. So beautifully maintained.”

We pass by Hef’s place, Neil Diamond’s old pad. A homeless character lounges on the turf outside Aaron Spelling’s huge manor.

The city becomes a blur, a film moving at high speed. We roll into West Hollywood, the Fairfax district, past more bars and boutiques, furniture stores and mini-malls.

Jean Shellcot is across the aisle. I want to ask for her thoughts. I like her tennis shoes: They zipper instead of tie.

I turn to her.

She appears to be sleeping.