Rotel Tours Feature A Hotel On Wheels

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 "Betten auf Rädern," or "beds on wheels." Want to see Africa lying down?

Answers to the obvious questions: Yes, there is a bathroom, but no, there are no showers. 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, unbelieveably, been hosting bus-bed tours of Europe, Asia, and Africa since 1959. It was founded in 1945 by a man named — we are not making this up — 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.
Cool, but we can't stop thinking about the shower thing. According to the never-wrong Internet, the buses make "occasional stops" at RV parks and campgrounds for the "express purpose of bathing." Yummy. Smells like... German spirit?

SOURCE: JALOPNIK