Site may help you save money on vacation

Budget Travel/Fabulous Travel, www.fabuloustravel.com/budget/budget.html, is a site full of tips and suggestions for anyone who loves to travel but needs to do it cheaply.

It offers dozens of budget travel tips, from geographical suggestions (such as an undiscovered county on the Texas Gulf Coast), tips on buying jewelry and art on a budget in Taos Pueblo, N.M., a thrifty tour of Scotland and saving money on a trip to Washington, D.C.

A section on practical tips includes a feature on 12 Things to Pack That Might Not Occur to You, First Time Backpacking Tips, Tips for Traveling with Your Pet, Fun at the Beach -- tips and packing lists, and Frugal Family Tips for Surviving Summer Festivals.

There are also stories on Solo Travel Safety Tips and How to Make Tourists Disappear (from your photos).

TraveLearn, www.travellearn.com, is a tour company that conducts learning vacations that include lectures, seminars, group discussions, meetings with locals and specially arranged field experiences.

Their site states that "We arrange for you to meet with friendly people in foreign places and balance 'shouldn't miss' sites with experiences not available on conventional tours."

Groups are small, averaging 14 travelers, and teachers come from a group of distinguished professors on staff at 300 universities. Local guides are also prominent in their fields and able to interpret both the past and present issues of their cultures. Tour groups stay in first-class hotels, all meals are included and each tour includes visits to local homes for dinner with a family. As an example, the site describes a China experience: "Eighty percent of China's population is made up of rural farmers. What is their life really like? A meal with a farm family in Weifang will give you an opportunity to experience their lives firsthand."

Because the groups are small, itineraries can include enough time for individuals to pursue special interests, or a group of three or four can decide to seek out a common interest, with a guide. The Web site also includes A Day in The Life, personal essays of a single day on a trip, written by various former travelers. They give you a window into how the tours play out and how travelers have felt about them. For destination and tour information, from the home page, go to Tours and enter where and when you'd like to go, then choose a price level, starting at $1,000-$2,000 and ending at $4,000 and up. For more details, visit the Web site or phone (800) 235-9114.

In print

"Bad Karma: Confessions of a Reckless Traveller in Southeast Asia" by Tamara Sheward is published by Academy Chicago Publishers at $17.95. It is a bad girl's guide to insensitive, politically incorrect travel. Written with an Aussie sarcasm, it can be bitingly funny, even while horrifying the reader who considers herself a careful traveler.

She makes fun of local cultures as well as travelers who are spiritual seekers, and refuses to see anything she finds as sacred. This book is not for everyone, but if you read to the end, you do find Sheward and her companion finally chastened by the killing fields of Cambodia.