10 Top Head Trips

Sure, you could go lie by the beach for a few days somewhere on your next vacation. But this year is also your chance to see Siberia with a scientist, Chichen Itza with a museum curator, baseball with the Smithsonian, Petra via private jet.

Those are a sampling from the hundreds of tours offered to the thinking traveler by museums, other cultural institutions and for-profit tour operators. Having recognized educational and cultural travel as a growth field, those organizations have been steadily adding alternatives to the marketplace.

For the last four years, this section has run a January roundup of 10 top tours sponsored by museums. This year, we’re relying on the same expert for our top 10 trip picks--Ann H. Waigand, publisher of The Educated Traveler newsletter--but we’ve broadened the field to include all thinking trips, no matter the sponsor.

Tours are in chronological order. Prices listed here are per person, presuming double occupancy, and are subject to change. Some prices include many meals and excursions, some don’t. Also bear in mind that tour operators generally reserve the right to cancel or change itineraries.

(Every year, Waigand lists hundreds of thinking trips in a Directory of Museum-sponsored Tours and a separate Directory of Special Interest Travel. The directories come with the cost of a subscription to The Educated Traveler, P.O. Box 220822, Chantilly, VA 20153; telephone [800] 648-5168. Cost is $48 yearly for six issues.)

Insights to the Ancient Maya

March 13 to 24. Sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Price: $3,150 excluding air fare to and from Merida, Mexico. Most meals included. For more information, contact Far Horizons Archaeological and Cultural Trips at (800) 552-4575) or the Tours at the Women’s Committee, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at (215) 898-9202).

Dr. Robert J. Sharer, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s excavations at Copan in Honduras (and curator of the museum’s American section), will lead this tour and take participants into the newly dug tunnels at Copan, which are currently closed to the public. Tours of Chichen Itza and Labna will be led by the directors of the excavations there.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Carolina-Style

June 18 to 21. Sponsored by Smithsonian Study Tours. Price: $725, excluding air fare to Durham, N.C. Includes meals. Itinerary is basically a Thursday to Sunday long weekend, with three games, ending after the Sunday afternoon game. For more information, contact Smithsonian Study Tours; tel. (202) 357-4700; or check Web page: https://www.si.edu/tsa/sst.

The topic of this domestic study tour is a change of pace for the Smithsonian: minor league baseball in America. Travelers go to the ballpark made famous in the film “Bull Durham” and attend presentations by experts including Miles Wolff, the minor-league entrepreneur who bought the Durham Bulls (later sold) in 1980; and the real “Crash” Davis, role model for the part played by Kevin Costner in “Bull Durham.”

Bali and Beyond

June 18 to July 4. Journeys of the Mind, a tour operator based in Oak Park, Ill. Price: $3,400, including round-trip air fare from Los Angeles on Singapore Airlines. Most meals included. For more information, contact the tour operator at (708) 383-8739.

You don’t often see a lot of private access in Bali, but this tour is chock full of it, as well as visits that highlight Balinese arts and crafts (including stone carvings, woodcarving, silver and gold, textiles, music, dance and even a stay at a hotel where a shaman is in residence). There is a lecture by the vice director of the Indonesian Academy of Performing Arts; and at the Krambitan Palace, travelers will get a private nine-course dinner and dance. Village dancers will perform the Tektekan Barong, a trance dance, accompanied by gamelan orchestra. Also includes four nights on the island of Sulawesi.

Island Hopping in the Cyclades: a Family Trip

July 2 to 18. Hellenic Adventures, a tour operator based in Minneapolis. Price: $3,995 to $4,385, excluding air fare to and from Athens. Most meals included. For more information, contact the tour operator at (800) 851-6349 or (612) 827-0937.

This is a family tour in every sense: The leaders are Hellenic Adventures owner Leftheris Papageorgiou, his wife, Jane, and their son, Alexandros (age 12). There’s a good mix of activities on this tour (essential when traveling with children), such as holding a footrace at the original Olympic site; visiting the oracle at Delphi; sailing on a 70-foot motor-sailer (children might enjoy watching, or helping with, the sails); snorkeling, swimming, fishing, walking in and around on an island itinerary that includes Kea (a.k.a. Keos), Syros, Tinos, Mykonos, Delos, Paros, Ios and Santorini. There are five days of cruising in all.

The Wallace Line: Where East Meets West

July 25 to Aug. 18. Sponsored by the Museum of Cultural & Natural History, Harvard University. Price: $7,980, including air fares between LAX and Singapore. Meals included. For more information, contact Aslan Adventures at (800) 325-0010 or the Museum of Cultural & Natural History at (617) 495-2463.

I’m quoting directly from the tour description because the concept is expressed so intriguingly: “An exploration of the Malay Archipelago by Buganese Schooner retracing the imaginary line Alfred Russel Wallace drew along the transition zone between the characteristic fauna and flora of Asia and that of Australia.” Alfred Alcorn, manager of the museum’s travel program, worked out the itinerary with a tour operator after it was proposed by two post-doctoral researchers. The schooner is 35 meters long and includes 13 cabins.

Lake Baikal and the Great Siberian Taiga

Aug. 9 to 23. Sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences. Price: $3,295, plus $1,399 air fare from San Francisco to Khabarovsk, Siberia, and return flight from Irkutsk (“the Paris of Siberia”). Meals included. For more information, contact Bonnie Frey, California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco at (415) 750-7348.

Led by Pat Kociolek, Interim Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences, and two scientists working at Lake Baikal, Russia, this tour is unique for the amount of time it spends on Lake Baikal (which is considered to be the “Russian Galapagos Islands”) and the in-depth nature of the educational program. Much of the travel, covering about 250 miles, is aboard the Russian vessel M.V. Zaisan, a 41-meter-long ship with modest accommodations for 20 participants. Three days are also spent on the Trans-Siberian Express railroad. In addition to the tour leaders, scientists and other experts in geology, ichthyology and Baikal seals also will be on board.

Tagging Whales: Mingan Island Cetacean Study

Aug. 10 to 17. Sponsored by the Science Museum of Minnesota. Price: $2,045, excluding air fare to and from Montreal. Includes most meals. For more information, contact Bill Allen, manager of adult education and travel programs at Science Museum of Minnesota; tel. (612) 221-4513.

Participants will observe and contribute to the study of blue, finback and humpback whales on Quebec’s Mingan Islands archipelago in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River, an area considered to be a feeding place for many cetaceans (including whales and dolphins) of the North Atlantic. Travelers will help biologist Richard Sears photograph whales, collect skin samples (from whales, not travelers), and place VHF or satellite tags. Particular attention will be paid to blue whales, a protected species that also is the largest species of cetacean. Lodgings are in a motel next to a field station near Labrador; fieldwork is actually water work, spent in the gulf on 24-foot inflatable boats, weather permitting.

Spain: Cradle ofthe Conquistadors

Sept. 17 to Oct. 1. Sponsored by Denver Museum of Natural History. Price: $6,395, including air fare to Madrid from Denver. Most meals included. For more information, contact the museum’s Voyages and International Tours department at (800) 753-8272 or (603) 445-2273.

Dr. Jane Day, Curator of Archaeology at the Denver Museum of Natural History, is a much loved and respected study tour leader. This tour has a wealth of intriguing visits. Among the stops: the 25,000-year-old cave paintings at Cuevas de la Pileta; Italica, birthplace of emperors Hadrian and Trajan and of poet Silius Italicus; La Rabida, the Franciscan monastery where Christopher Columbus took refuge after Ferdinand and Isabela initially refused to finance his explorations; Medellin, birthplace of Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico; as well as a stay in the 16th-century fortified palace that was home to Emperor Carlos V for a year.

Bhutan

Oct. 9 to 25. Sponsored by The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. Price: $4,990, which includes meals, but excludes air fare to Bangkok, where itinerary begins and ends. More information available from Geographic Expeditions in San Francisco at (800) 777-8183.

Some people tack a few days in Bhutan onto a tour combining Tibet and Nepal. The Textile Museum devoted an entire tour to Bhutan in 1995, a natural choice of destination for the museum considering that textiles are considered Bhutan’s most distinctive art form. This tour is a repeat of that successful program with tour leader and Himalayan expert Bill Jones, joined by Textile Museum Research Associate Mattiebelle Gittinger.

Journey to History’s Lost Cities by Private Jet

Oct. 27 to Nov. 20. American Museum of Natural History. Price: $27,950, including meals, excluding air fare to and from London. The private jet is a chartered 88-passenger Boeing 757 (an aircraft that commercial airlines usually configure with 283 seats.) The trip is sold out, but there is a waiting list, and travelers often have a good chance of getting in. For more information, contact Discovery Tours, the educational travel department of the American Museum of Natural History in New York at (800) 462-8687.

The American Museum of Natural History has long been known for creating truly innovative itineraries and this trip is definitely in that tradition. (It’s also the priciest of about 60 different itineraries offered by the institution this year, at prices beginning at $2,500 per person.) This is a rare chance for a single tour to include so many “secluded sanctuaries of ancient civilizations.” Among them: Petra, Jordan; Sanaa, Yemen; Muscat, Oman; Angkor, Cambodia; Vientiane, Laos; Katmandu and Tiger Tops Game Lodge, Nepal; Lhasa, Tibet; Beijing, China; Ulan Bator, Mongolia; and Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Leaders cover a spectrum of topics and include an expert on the evolution of mammals (senior vice president and museum provost Michael Novacek), two scholars of Asian art and archeology, and an expert in geopolitical issues and diplomatic history.