Alaska: All of it by bus, or bust

HEADS are nodding, bodies are limp, soft snoring sounds are escaping from the throat of the man across the aisle from me. Later, he will describe this drive -- 11 hours on a bus -- as “the ride from hell.” It’s not. It’s just infernally boring.

We’re trapped in a motor coach heading north on an Alaskan Adventure Tour, seven days and nights that will take us from Anchorage to Fairbanks to Denali National Park, site of North America’s highest peak, 20,320-foot-tall Mt. McKinley.

The tour is being run by Cosmos, one of the world’s largest budget travel companies. The big plus is that it’s relatively inexpensive. The big minus: It’s a yawner.

I have joined a group of 45 travelers from 7 years old to more than 70 and hailing from the U.S., Australia, India and New Zealand. I’m traveling anonymously as sort of a consumer scout, testing the waters of some of the world’s premier tour companies. I plan to write about this trip’s pluses and minuses, but I also want to have fun: see grizzlies, moose and other wildlife and learn about this larger-than-life place called Alaska.

Instead, I doze constantly. I see almost no wildlife; I have no fun.

My Alaskan Adventure is in danger of morphing into Alaskan Inertia. Many of my fellow travelers feel the same way.

“Everybody’s complaining about this tour,” Rose Woodward, of Sydney, Australia, says on the fourth day.

A Cosmos spokesman acknowledges that the tour has special challenges, primarily the great distances involved in Alaskan travel. But the bottom line is the bottom line: “You get a lot for the money,” says Steve Born, marketing vice president.

“Cosmos tours are known for being a good value. How do you move a group of 45 people from one place to another as inexpensively as possible? That’s what we do. That’s how we stay true to the value promise we make.”

I’d been looking forward to seeing Alaska for months: crystal glaciers, misty fiords, majestic mountains.

Finally, on a rainy Sunday morning in mid-June, the adventure gets underway. My fellow travelers and I have each paid $1,429, double occupancy. (Single travelers are assessed an additional $450.) The price covers only the tour; airfare is extra. Mine cost about $800 from LAX to Anchorage.

We pile on the bus and pull out of town at 9 a.m. Tour director Bridget Broderick, perky and enthusiastic, begins an orientation, sketching out our itinerary and sketching in all the optional tours.

The tour we purchased is pretty basic: transportation, no-frills hotel accommodations, guide and two short boat rides. But there is leisure time in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Denali. We can fill these voids by buying special optional tours. About $2,000 worth of leisure-time activities is available, including a helicopter ride over Mt. McKinley ($284), a bear-viewing tour southwest of Anchorage ($489), a drive-fly combo that will take us from Fairbanks to the Arctic Circle ($399). Less pricey options include rafting ($75) and a Denali bus tour ($99).While Broderick collects sign-up sheets, our bus snakes its way south along Seward Highway. To the right of us are the rolling waters of the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet, to the left, jagged mountain cliffs that are part of the Chugach Range.

We’re on our way to Portage Glacier, one of 10,000 in Chugach National Forest. The glacier’s proximity to Anchorage -- only a 55-mile drive -- has helped make it one of the state’s top visitor attractions. The showers that have bedeviled our sightseeing this morning turn to hard rain just as we leave the bus to board a boat for an hourlong ride to the glacier. Everyone runs for cover.

“You should have been here last week,” the captain says. “It was sunny and in the 70s.”

Today it’s hovering in the 40s and the misty fiord is so socked in that the glacier is hard to see. But everyone is in a good mood nonetheless. It can’t rain every day, we guess, not knowing that it will. In fact, it will even snow.

We leave the glacier and realize we’re just a few miles from Whittier and Prince William Sound, which has the greatest concentration of tidewater glaciers in Alaska. But our bus returns to Anchorage, where “the afternoon and evening are free for independent activities,” according to our itinerary.

Broderick, an elementary-school teacher by winter, tour leader by summer, apologizes for the city as we roll into town. “It’s not real attractive,” she says. “The first thing you see is a lot of bars. But that’s what you get in a boom-and-bust city like this.”

Half the state’s population -- about 300,000 people -- lives in Anchorage. Its lack of planning is the first thing most visitors notice, along with urban sprawl, mini-malls, trailer parks and fast-food restaurants. In many ways, it’s just like cities in the Lower 48, although you rarely see moose wandering through towns down south.

The city’s rough edges are softened by brilliant summer flower beds and huge hanging baskets. “Our growing season is short,” Broderick says. “So everyone rushes to put flowers out as soon as it warms up.”

The long, long ride

AS we arrive at the hotel, a modest Ramada Inn in downtown Anchorage, she gives us instructions. “Put your luggage outside the door of your room by 6 [a.m.] tomorrow. We have a long travel day ahead of us and need to leave by 7.”

Folks look a little sleepy in the morning, but spirits are high. We’re excited about the scenery we’ll be seeing on this 600-mile drive to Fairbanks.

We head northeast along Alaska Highway 1 toward the Wrangell Mountains. The countryside is bright mint green with low vegetation and green forests stretching as far as the eye can see.

Several places offer pretty views, but the bus keeps moving. Finally, in the Tahneta Pass, we stop at a viewpoint to ogle the Matanuska Glacier in the distance. My companions rush to the edge of the lookout to snap pictures.

“This is only a 10-minute stop,” the bus driver warns us.

It is the only viewpoint we will visit during the weeklong tour. This is not a trip for photographers -- unless they don’t mind shooting pictures out the window of a moving bus.

We continue north on the Richardson Highway. We have learned Alaska is a land of sweeping tundra and thousands of miles of open ground dotted by black spruce trees. We see hundreds of thousands of them. They are stunted, mutant-looking trees, hardy enough to survive Alaska’s cold and permafrost. Broderick says they are Alaska’s least favorite tree. A scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks calls them “the jackasses of the northern forests -- ungainly looking, ugly little beasts.”

They are the main thing we see through the bus window. We start to make fun of them. We say we’ve become afflicted with Black Spruce Fever. It causes sleepiness, we joke, pointing to our fellow travelers who are nodding in their seats.

The marathon bus ride isn’t unpleasant, just tedious. The bus is cushy. We have footrests, and soft music is playing. We find ourselves growing lethargic, sluggish, listless. Our naps are disturbed by occasional stops: at a grocery store for snacks, at the Santa Claus House in North Pole south of Fairbanks (where we can buy T-shirts that say “I’m on Santa’s good list”). We stop only where there are multiple bathrooms.

During our long hours on the bus, we glean shadowy secrets about our companions: who drinks lunch, who’s fighting with the spouse; who grabs the front seat every day. I begin to enjoy speculating about my fellow travelers. It helps me stay awake.

For about $1,000 more, I could have joined a 10-day Globus tour. The itinerary is the same, except for a couple of important additions: I would have cruised Prince William Sound and Kenai Fjords National Park, both known for their ice fields, glaciers and marine life.

Globus is the rich uncle of Cosmos; it’s the premium arm of a Swiss-owned travel company founded in 1928. Globus’ five brands -- Brennan Vacations, Monograms, Avalon Waterways, Cosmos and the largest, namesake Globus -- offer hundreds of itineraries in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. They constitute the world’s largest escorted travel company, moving half a million travelers a year.

Cosmos’ niche within the family is as the thrifty younger brother, “dedicated to giving you the excitement of faraway places at a down-to-earth price,” according to a brochure.

Several travelers in the Alaskan Adventure group said they had enjoyed other Cosmos tours. Aussie Woodward had just completed a Western Canada tour she loved. “The itinerary was more interesting; even the accommodations were better” on that trip, she said. “There were pools and spas everywhere we stayed.” Our lodging had no such amenities.

John Cothren, a retired Indiana physical education teacher, is a Cosmos regular. He likes the company because he can choose restaurants and activities. “But I think they tried to do a little too much with this one,” he said.

Company spokesman Born said our lengthy bus rides weren’t typical of the company’s itineraries. “The average travel time for our North American tours is four to five hours,” Born said.

Arctic Circle

IN Fairbanks, Broderick briefs us on the morning’s activities. About a third of us will meet in the lobby at 4:45 a.m. for the Arctic Circle Adventure, “an award-winning, full-day guided round-trip journey by land and air to the Arctic Circle.” It is a $399 optional tour.

My group of Arctic Adventurers looks a little wilted in the early-morning light. We wilt further when we learn we will be on a bus for nine hours. And our new bus lacks the cushy amenities of the main tour-company bus. It bounces, sighs and creaks as we roll north on Dalton Highway, much of which is unpaved.

A couple of hours slide by.

Outside my window is more tundra, more black spruce. And this bus driver is even less interested in scenic stops than the last one was, but he seems to enjoy pointing out places where people died in horrible accidents.

“The bad news,” says an Aussie seated in front of me, “is that we’ve only come 60 miles. There’s 200 more ahead of us.”

There is other bad news too. “Mossies are everywhere,” another Aussie says. Mossies are mosquitoes.

Bored, I join other Arctic Adventurers in a game of “squash the mosquitoes.” Soon the windows of the bus are coated with mashed bugs. We’ve unwittingly succeeded in making the trip even less interesting because now we can’t see through the windows.

I stop fighting it and sleep.

Good and not-so-good

AFTER nearly a week of nodding off at inappropriate times, I was relieved to say farewell to the Cosmos bus. There were things I liked about my weeklong Alaskan Adventure Tour -- the state is an incredible place and my fellow travelers were fun -- but the tour’s minuses outnumbered its pluses. Here’s a summary.

* Trip highlights: the Alaskan Railroad and Denali National Park. After our mega-ride to the Arctic Circle, Cosmos gave us a break and booked us on the Alaska Railroad from Fairbanks to Denali National Park. It was less confining and much more fun than the bus. The engineer even slowed for photos when we passed interesting scenery.

At Denali, a host of “leisure activities” was available; most Alaskan Adventurers took the optional Tundra Wilderness Tour ($99), which put us on a park bus -- it bore a striking resemblance to the elementary-school bus I once rode -- for eight hours. Yes, we saw many black spruce. Yes, we dozed. But we also saw six grizzlies, a moose, several caribou and dozens of wild Dall sheep. It was the only wildlife most of us saw on the trip.

* What I would do differently: Skip Fairbanks (and multiple days on a bus), ride the Alaskan Railroad north from Anchorage to Denali and south from Anchorage to Seward at the edge of beautiful Kenai Fjords National Park.

* Alaskans suggest: “Take a cruise first,” says Jennifer Thompson of the Alaska Travel Industry Assn. “We have 1 1/2 million visitors a year, and 900,000 of them come on cruise ships. It’s a phenomenal way to introduce yourself to Alaska. Wildlife, glaciers, majestic mountains. It’s all there. And then Alaska’s great distances don’t seem so overwhelming.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Rating the tour

The company

Name: Cosmos, part of the Globus family of tour companies

Target audience: Travelers older than 40 seeking inexpensive, escorted tours

Type of tours: 90 itineraries in Europe and North America

Accommodations: No-frills hotels and motels

For more information on Cosmos: (800) 276-1241, www.cosmos.com

For information about Alaska: Alaska Travel Industry Assn., (800) 862-5275 or (907) 929-2200, www.travelalaska.com

The Alaska Railroad, (907) 265-2494, www.akrr.com

*

The tour

Cosmos Alaskan Adventure

(On a scale of one to five stars)

Itinerary: *

Guide: ****

Lodging: **

Value: **

Overall experience: **

Would I choose this tour again? No

Per-day charge: $207 (land only, based on double occupancy)

Charge if booked separately: $143.71 (land only, based on double occupancy)

Pros:

* Denali National Park and the Alaskan Railroad are winners.

* The trip is inexpensive.

* The planning has all been done for you. No need to study where to go, what to do.

* Porterage is included. No need to haul your bags to your room.

Cons:

* Too many hours on buses.

* Lack of itinerary inventiveness. Alaska is a terrific place. Why can’t travelers get a more interesting look at it?

* Photographers will be frustrated by a lack of photo stops.

* Optional tours need better oversight.

-- Rosemary McClure