Tours for the Thinking Person : Top 10 Museum Trips : Now on exhibit: the wonders of the world. Institutions line up excursions with a focus on history, art, and culture.

Peru, Botswana, Norway and Minneapolis. Ships, skeletons and tepees. These are but a few of the destinations and topics targeted by our top 10 museum-sponsored tours of 1996.

As she has yearly since 1993, Ann H. Waigand, publisher of the Educated Traveler newsletter, selected those trips from more than 300 being offered this year by American museums and other nonprofit institutions.

The tours here are in chronological order. Prices are per person, assuming double occupancy, and, as always, are subject to change. Some prices include most meals and side trips; others don’t. Tours are subject to availability and organizers reserve the right to change or cancel itineraries. For more information on any of them, contact tour-sponsoring institutions through the phone numbers or addresses that follow.

(A full directory of museum-sponsored trips goes out annually and is available to those who subscribe to the Educated Traveler, P.O. Box 220822, Chantilly, VA 22022; telephone 800-648-5168. Cost is $39 yearly for six issues, a tour directory and early information on trips sponsored by the newsletter, this year including journeys to Russia, the Czech Republic and Germany.)

Atlantic Ocean and Islands: Antigua to Lisbon

April 10-25. Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; tel. (215) 299-1060. Price: $2,995-$4,220, depending on cabin selection, excluding air fare to Antigua (or Panama City) and from Lisbon.

The itinerary applies a scientific spin to a transatlantic repositioning cruise. Port calls of the 80-passenger Polaris, operated by Special Expeditions, begin with Antigua in the Caribbean and include two days in the nine-island, mid-Atlantic Azores archipelago, another stop in Madeira (“floating garden of the Atlantic”) and disembarkation at Lisbon. Lecturers will emphasize seabirds, whales, island botany, ecology of the sea and the history of Atlantic exploration. Lecturers include Dennis Puleston, an England-born veteran sailor and longtime Atlantic tour leader; James Kelley, an oceanographer and past president of the California Academy of Sciences, and Lea Williams, history professor emeritus at Brown University. There’s also a bonus possibility: For no extra cost, travelers can embark five days early, on April 5, from Panama City.

Brazil

April 23-May 3. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington; tel. (202) 244-1448. Price: Not yet set, but organizers estimate $3,850, excluding air fare.

Itinerary includes Sao Paulo, the colonial town of Ouro Pre^to, and Rio de Janeiro. The trip draws inspiration from an upcoming exhibition on Latin American women artists (scheduled to run Feb. 8-April 29 at the museum), and is led by the museum’s curator of contemporary art, Susan Sterling. Stops include visits to museums, artists’ studios and private art collections.

Ascent of Man: South Africa and Botswana

May 3-19. American Museum of Natural History, New York; tel. (800) 462-8687. Price: $5,625, excluding air fare.

Itinerary includes Cape Town; the Magaliesberg Mountains outside Johannesburg; Sterkfontein Cave, where the first fossilized Australopithicus africanus skull was found in 1936; at least one dinner in the bush, and visits to several game reserves and lodges in Botswana and South Africa, including famed Kruger National Park. Speakers include Philip Tobias of Witwatersrang University, one of South Africa’s leading paleoanthropologists, and South African historian Cyril Hromnick. Lodgings range from luxurious country hotels to a game lodge safari camp. Trip leader: Ian Tattersall, an authority on human evolution and curator of the natural history museum’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution.

Peru Expedition

May 4-19. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; tel. (213) 744-3350.

Itinerary includes Lima, Cuzco, Machu Picchu and ruins near Chiclayo and Trujillo. Tour leader: Karen Wise, the natural history museum’s assistant curator of anthropology, who spends two to three months yearly on excavations in Peru. Wise specializes in coastal environments and ancient fishing communities. Cost: $3,970, plus $907 round-trip air fare from Los Angeles.

Treasures of England: Celebrating Smithsonian’s 150th Birthday

May 11-22. Smithsonian Study Tours and Seminars; tel. (202) 357-4700. Price: $4,495, including air fare from New York.

The itinerary includes London, Oxford, the Cotswolds and Stratford-on-Avon, birthplace and burial place of William Shakespeare. The tour will emphasize the England of James Smithson (an Oxford-educated chemist, mineralogist and collector who died in 1829, leaving in his will the funds that became seed money for the Smithsonian Institution). Several museums and cultural institutions are prominently featured, including guided visits to the British Museum in London and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Other stops include Spencer House (built by Princess Diana’s family in London in the 18th century), along with Sotheby’s Auction House, the Houses of Parliament and a farewell dinner at London’s historic and exclusive Reform Club.

Villas and Gardens in the Veneto and Lake Regions of Northern Italy

May 19-31. Connecticut State Museum of Natural History at the University of Connecticut; tel. (860) 486-4460. Price: $2,899, including air fare from New York.

Itinerary includes Milan, Venice (three nights), Padova, Vicenza, Palladio, Verona, Stretsa, near Lake Maggiore, and Tremezzo, near Lake Como. Stops will emphasize palaces, villas, museums, village and botanical gardens. The tour leader is Rudy Favretti, emeritus professor of plant science at the University of Connecticut, one of the world’s leading restoration landscape architects and a specialist in garden history.

Norwegian Coastal Cruise

May 26-June 7. Jointly sponsored by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Alumni and Alumnae of Vassar College; tel. (800) 221-1944. Price: $3,995-$4,195, including round-trip air fare from New York.

The ship is the 3-year-old Kong Harald, which delivers mail and supplies while ferrying passengers to fishing villages and Nordic towns in the Arctic regions of one of the world’s northernmost societies. Itinerary includes six nights of cruising on the 490-passenger vessel, three nights in Bergen during that city’s annual music festival, two nights in Oslo, a look at Troll Fjord, and port stops including the city of Kirkenes, Norway; the Art Nouveau town of Alesund and the Arctic expedition base of Tromso. Lecturer: Scandinavian affairs expert Sherrod McCall, a former Harvard Fellow and longtime Foreign Service official with the U.S. State Department.

Native America by Chartered DC-3

July 6-17. Smithsonian Study Tours and Seminars; tel. (202) 357-4700. Transportation is via specially chartered 26-passenger plane to allow access to otherwise hard-to-reach destinations. Price: $5,500, excluding transportation to Minneapolis and from Missoula, Mont..

Itinerary includes five reservations--White Earth, Lower Brule Sioux, Pine Ridge and Flathead--in Minnesota, South Dakota and Montana. Tour includes two nights in tepees, meetings with an Ojibwa elder and Pine Ridge tribal leaders, wildlife viewing and various performing and folk arts demonstrations. Trip leader will be Rick West, director of the still-in-formation National Museum of the American Indian.

Oaxaca: Day of the Dead

Oct. 27-Nov. 2. The Art Institute of Chicago; tel. (312) 443-3917. Price: Not yet set, but estimated at $2,000, excluding air fare to and from Oaxaca.

Based entirely in the Mexican city of Oaxaca, the program emphasizes arts and crafts (especially those surrounding the region’s annual Nov. 1 dia de los muertos celebrations) and regional cuisine. Lodgings are at the Hotel Camino Real, a converted monastery, and activities include visits to museums, galleries, private collections, artists’ studios (including the workplace of Rodolfe Morales, acclaimed as the area’s leading living artist), archeological sites, and, on Nov. 1, the cemetery.

Britain’s Maritime Heritage

Oct. 2-16. The Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia, tel. (804) 591-7795 (ask for Carole Lynn). Price: $3,400, including air fare from Norfolk or Newport bews/Williamsburg airports in Virginia.

Itinerary includes London, Portsmouth and Bath with day trips to Oxford, the 18th-century shipbuilding village of Bucklers Hard. Stops include England’s National Maritime Museum, Chatham dockyards, the Royal Navy, D-Day and Royal Navy Submarine museums, and Winston Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms.