THE GLOBAL TRAVEL INDUSTRY is a $6-trillion-a-year business driven by one simple urge: the deep human desire to get out there and see something different. Four new books—on cross-country golf, extreme tourism, primitive intoxication, and spiritual surfing safaris—explore just how strange that quest can be.

You may recognize the byline André Tolmé—if not by name, by deed. In May 2003, the 33-year-old Bay Area engineer flew to Central Asia with a three-iron, 500 golf balls, and a dream: to traverse the 1,234-mile-long Mongolian Steppe, swinging all the way. As the title of I Golfed Across Mongolia (Thunder's Mouth Press, $25) indicates, Tolmé made it—but not without some struggles. His "course" (a par 11,880) was one of the greatest grasslands in the world, a treeless expanse free of sand traps. He faced few water hazards but many dung piles, a handful of wolves, and, thanks to solitary days and changeless views, long bouts of boredom. Don't buy this book looking for grand soliloquies on the game—Tolmé isn't a guy who cares about epiphanies. He's just a weekend duffer with the greatest 19th-hole story ever told.

In West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief (Bloomsbury, $24), Los Angeles–based writer Steven Kotler recounts his three-year journey in search of the legendary Conductor, a man on a surfboard who's said to control the waves with a baton made of human bone. It's an old surfing myth, one told from Mexico to Indonesia, and in his hunt for its origins Kotler rummages through Maori history and Taoist texts as he samples swells throughout America and New Zealand. In the end he finds the source of the legend, but by then the Conductor has become secondary to Kotler's quest for the spiritual side of surfing. He wants to know why catching waves offers Zen moments unavailable to, say, motocross riders. "There have been many theories about the spiritual nature of this sport," he writes, "and most involve some form of watery communion." It happened to Kotler—twice. He tasted transcendence, briefly, while surfing in Santa Monica and off Oahu's North Shore. At those times he entered a world "where time slowed, where sound vanished, where vision worked in 360 degrees"—and wipeouts didn't exist.