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You lie on a beach, play golf, tennis or bridge, hike in a forest or go boating on a lake. Or you join a motor-coach group and gaze out the window as the scenery rushes past. An overwhelming percentage of Americans engage in a limited list of standard vacation activities, and only a small slice of them — perhaps 10 percent — opt for a more daring and committed form of alternative travel. I happen to be partial to the latter choice.

It doesn't require an arduous effort to enter the world of alternative vacations. For instance, you can start easily and without risk by simply choosing to devote your next vacation to health. There are resorts all over America that are devoted to weight loss. Instead of just marking time on vacation, you can check into the Duke Diet and Fitness Center (www.cfl.duke.edu) at Duke University in Durham, N.C., where they will limit you to 1,200 calories a day — coupled with exercise — and you can lose a dozen pounds in less than two weeks.

From that easy first step, you can then up the ante and opt for a bit of adventure by going to a type of resort that was once regarded as outlandish but is today mainstream — a residential yoga center, of which there are dozens — and you can experience the Eastern or Asian lifestyle that billions of people around the world regard as vital. You can vacation from April through October at the Omega Institute (www.eomega.org) near Rhinebeck, N.Y., or at one of its several West Coast affiliates. And there, at a very modest cost, you can take classes in yoga, tai chi and all sorts of practices that open your mind to new possibilities.

You can also take off a week or two in January or early February and fly to the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to a community of tented bungalows overlooking the Caribbean, known as Maho Bay camps (www.maho.org). Last January, I spent an exhilarating one-week vacation there, where I took morning meditation classes led by the famous Jon Kabat-Zinn.

After you've sampled these more unusual resorts, you can move on easily to vacations at famous universities during the college's vacation periods. Adults of all ages live in vacated student residences and eat in student dining halls. You can spend part of your summer at Cornell's Adult University (www.sce.cornell.edu/cau/) in Ithaca, N.Y., or you can travel in the same season — as my wife and I have done — to Oxford in England (www.conted.ox.ac.uk) or University College Dublin (www.ucd.ie) in Ireland. Or you can go to the mountainside campus of St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M., in July. This is where my wife and I devoted an entire week one year to reading and discussing Dante's "Inferno."

And as part of this new world of travel, you can opt to visit exotic areas of the world, like China or Vietnam. Go to China Focus (www.chinafocus travel.com), a San Francisco-based tour operator, and book a 12-night tour in the winter to six Chinese cities (Beijing, Ji'nan, Tai'an, Qufu, Suzhou, Shanghai), starting at an amazing $999; this includes airfare, overnight accommodations and meals.

Or you can contact the Canadian tour operator called Gap Adventures (www.gap adventures.com), which offers inexpensive tours to various countries of Central America and makes a point of placing you in locally owned lodges or even with private families.

This is but a small sampling of alternative vacations. Try one of them, and you'll find it hard to return to standard recreations.