BudgetTravel

WHO KNEW? Book a trip that stops at one of the scientific outposts, such as the Ukranian-run Vernadsky Research Station. You can get a mock Antarctica stamp in your passport and have a drink and play pool with the scientists who live there year-round. --Matthew Link

Graceland Memphis, Tennessee

The King is rock-and-roll royalty, and Graceland is America's Versailles. Priscilla Presley threw open the wrought-iron, musical-staff gates of Elvis's 14-acre estate to the public in 1982, and it has since become one of the nation's most-visited homes, a holy-pilgrimage site for 600,000 fans annually, and for the unenlightened, a curiosity of American kitsch.

GETTING THERE: Low-cost carrier AirTran serves Memphis, and Graceland is barely four miles west of the runway. A direct taxi costs just $10. Taxis downtown run $25, or hop on the $15 airport shuttle. Sun Studio, where Elvis once crooned alongside Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, runs a free shuttle bus (800/441-6249) that stops hourly at the blues clubs on Beale Street, Stax Records, Sun Records, Heartbreak Hotel, and Graceland.

YOU MADE IT: The 90-minute tour ($18) of the home's perfectly preserved '70s decor covers the Jungle Room (with built-in fountain and shag carpeting), the bedroom Elvis kept for his mama, and a vintage kitchen where he scarfed peanut butter and banana sandwiches and fried pickle chips. Outbuildings house guitars, press clippings, rhinestone-slathered jumpsuits, video snippets, and endless walls of gold records. The tour ends by the pool, at Presley's Meditation Garden grave. Additional tickets get you in to see the original pink Cadillac and other Presley cars ($8), his customized jets ($7), and the "Sincerely Elvis" collection of personal items ($6). Graceland is closed Tuesdays from November to February (800/238-2000, elvis.com).

WHO KNEW? Just coming to pay your respects? Skip the mansion tour and spend some time at the graves; that's free from 7 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. (8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. in winter). Area hotels are booked solid during the week leading up to the August 16 anniversary of Presley's (alleged) death. In any event, you can save by staying in the huge $30 rooms at the new casinos of Tunica, Miss., an easy 30 miles south on U.S. 61. --RB

Angkor Wat Siem Reap, Cambodia

A thousand years ago, this metropolis of tumbledown temples was the seat of Southeast Asia's mighty Khmer culture. This sprawling collection of palaces, causeways, and monasteries (the most famous of which is the corncob-spired namesake, Angkor Wat) was overgrown by the jungle in the 1400s, and not until the mid-1800s was this mysterious Lost City seen by Europeans. French anthropologists reassembled much of the ruins, but Cambodia's apocalyptic civil war in the '70s once again made it a no-man's-land. Today, peaceful and cleared of mines, its crenellated towers and murky kapok-tree-clogged moats inspire national pride in Cambodians-and Indiana Jones delusions in Westerners.

GETTING THERE: First fly to Bangkok, which costs $600 from the West Coast on a good day in late spring; last May, Gate 1 Travel (800/682-3333, gate1travel.com) charged $639 for flights plus five nights' hotel. There, cruise the cheap travel agents of Khao San Road and buy a ticket for the 50-minute flight (typically $150 each way) to Siem Reap, the modernized tourist town servicing Angkor Wat. Upon arrival, you'll pay $20 cash (bring greenbacks) for a tourist visa.

YOU MADE IT: Although the place sounds inaccessible beyond imagination, it's as easy to see as any other world-class tourist site. Three-day entry passes to Angkor Wat cost $40; weeklong ones, $60. Then slip on your boots and hire your own guide at local rates. Just $20 a day gets you an accredited English-speaking guide who'll escort you around the 300-square-kilometer park on a moped. At night (and in the afternoon, when the heat gets ugly), crash at Bakong Guest House (1 Sivatha St., 011-855/63-380-126), which does free airport runs and charges $15 for a single and $20 for a double for air-conditioned rooms (a must). Two sites you shouldn't miss are Bayon, the temple studded with spooky staring faces like some sort of living chessboard, and Ta Prohm, where you can clamber through caved-in galleries and root-chewed breezeways. There's food and drink for sale at kiosks throughout the park, and vendors hawk vibrant local fabrics for a few bucks each-bring them home as presents and lie about what you spent.

WHO KNEW? If you can, time your visit for the week of April 13, the Khmer New Year, when rural Cambodians (many of whom have never seen Westerners like you before) throng this national treasure for picnics, festivities, and raucous fights with talcum powder and Super Soakers. --JC