I want to take an epic journey.
But nothing too taxing.
A long sojourn away from beepers, e-mail, phones and faxes.
But without really roughing it.
Not a vacation. Not a holiday. No point A to point B and back again.
I want a train trip. A long train trip. The longest train trip.
Beijing to Moscow via Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Five thousand miles. Seven time zones. Two continents. Not on one of those scummy Russian trains with their overflowing toilets, smelly, crowded compartments and stern, blue-uniformed ladies ruling over each car.
No, I want a special train. A nice bed, decent food and stops, so I can see something more than glimpses speeding past a mud-splattered window. Enough security so I won't need a bicycle chain to latch my bag to my bunk. In the wonderful world of post-Cold War capitalism, such a train exists. Come the second week of June, I'm in a small train station at the foot of the Great Wall of China near Beijing. In front of me is the gleaming China Orient Express, one of two vintage trains that will be my home for the next 10 days.

BEIJING: INTO THE BUBBLE My first glimpse of the 7,865-kilometer route comes out of a tour bus window in the late afternoon after a quick tour of the Great Wall. After three days of solo travel in Beijing, I'm in the bubble now. Tour guides. Tour buses. Itineraries. Paid-in-advance meals.
At the station, a girl of about 7, in her communist Young Pioneer uniform, comes out to watch the gaggle of Americans with their baseball caps, Dockers slacks and fanny packs step up into the ornate train at the platform.
I'm directed to my compartment, E-4, a gorgeous red-lacquered, wood-lined cabin accented with brass fixtures. The bathroom is down the hall, though I share a wash basin and tap in a two-door cubbyhole with the two ladies in the compartment next door. Dinner is my first chance to meet my fellow travelers. Nearly all of the 63 people on the tour are Americans, save for a small knot of Canadians and a couple from New Zealand. The youngest are in their late 30s, the oldest pushing 90 - with the bulk in the 50-to-70 age range.
People who have the time and money to make the journey.
"This is a fascinating part of the world that was, you know, off-limits to Americans for so long - I wanted to see it for myself," says Barry Gittelson, an architect from Malibu.
Most are seasoned travelers, whose travel stories begin with lines like, "The pygmy guide took us to the leper colony that morning. "Name the most distant corners of the world - Antarctica, the Arctic Circle, Patagonia, the Sahara - and a sizable chunk of the passengers on the train have not only been there but can give you the name of a good restaurant or a spot to get a cold beer.
Back in my compartment after dinner, I indulge in some long-term window gazing as the train rolls along at sunset through placid green rice paddies and garbage-strewn industrial towns. A man herding one bull, one cow and one goat down a dirt path. A squat pre-World War II black locomotive on the side of a rail line, just getting up steam. Two girls in floral dresses playing badminton. A horse-drawn cart. All moments suddenly coming into the window frame, then vanishing as soon as they're recognized. Just before I close the blinds for the night, four Chinese air force jets streak overhead, following the rail line, their red-orange afterburners glowing in the blue-black of twilight.

ERLIAN: TEH UGLY OVEN Morning dawns and we find we're the captives of bureaucrats in this ugly oven of a border town while we switch from the Chinese to Russian train and we negotiate our entry to Mongolia. Like the Orient Express of the movies, our train swirls with dark rumors to explain our long delay in this Chinese version of Tijuana: The Mongolian locomotive needed to take us north didn't arrive. The Chinese want bribes to let us go. The Russian train we're supposed to transfer to has mechanical problems and can't leave. Nothing substantiated, but truth never gets in the way of a good round of gossip.
After Westernized Beijing, Erlian is a shock - a strong dose of the grungy side of the real China. We're as much an exotic experience to the locals as they are to us. To kill time, train passengers hire nearly every pedicab in town to ferry them two by two to the local marketplace.
"Pay the drivers $2, no more - that's our deal," warns Ingrid Nettleship, the American guide on the tour who has done this trip before.
The dusty market hums to a hundred voices, a mishmash of Chinese, Mongolian, Russian and English. Dollars are the currency of choice, and four will buy you a nice duffel bag or a lacquered wooden box. Chinese characters and Russian Cyrillic letters collide on signs over stalls selling knockoff designer wear, cheap toys and household goods. Smoke rises from little barbecues where meat of dubious origin is sold on skewers.
The return trip turns into a race, with the train passengers egging the pedicab drivers to pass others. The cabs bounce along in a colorful sweep, the hooting and hollering Americans drawing the stares of the locals along the way.
The good humor wears off when the armada of pedicabs arrives back at the station. The approval to leave is nowhere in sight. Worst of all, our air-conditioned Chinese train has left, leaving us to swelter in our new home, the Russian-operated Nostalgic Istanbul Orient Express.
The Nostalgic Istanbul Orient Express isn't the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, the ultradeluxe train that runs between Paris and Venice. But neither are we paying the $2,000 a night that train costs (our trip runs about $500 per night). We climb aboard to find our compartments - beautiful art nouveau relics of a bygone era. My cabin, No.32 in car 6, has a single bed, a wash basin and a small table by the window. But like many antiques, not everything works like new. Some of the rugs are frayed, the woodwork nicked. The hinge on my medicine cabinet falls off and the bulb won't stay in the reading lamp.
"I was under the impression this was going to be luxurious," says passenger Don Norby of Kona, Hawaii. "They say Marlene Dietrich took this train. If that's true, I want to know where she hung all her clothes - there's no closet." In keeping with a train of the era, there's no air conditioning. It's not a small consideration on the edge of the Gobi Desert. I take out a thermometer in my cabin, and the red mercury is pushing beyond the 90-degree mark. Up and down the train, passengers swelter in their compartments as we wait for the Chinese and Mongolians to let us proceed up the line.
The heat will be the main complaint of passengers for the rest of the trip - an unavoidable nuisance for some, a constant energy-sapping block to enjoying the trip to others. But the only alternative to our tour train can be seen clearly across the track - the dirty, noisy and hot Russian trains with their six-to-a-compartment cabins and occasional smashed window.
Whatever the drawbacks, we're in the relative lap of luxury.
After what seems like an endless day, the train finally is allowed to leave in the late afternoon.
One Russian train manager later asks Ramsey Su, a Chinese-American dot-com entrepreneur from San Diego, to write down, "When can our train please leave? " in Chinese characters to be used for the next trip.
"I should have written, `When are you going to stop jerking us around and let us get the hell out of here? "' Su says.
As we chug into Mongolia, a scruffy platoon of soldiers in hand-me-down ex-Soviet o-live-drab uniforms salutes our arrival at the station.
"I tried throwing cigarettes to them, but none of them would take them," says Lou Taylor of Ruston, La.
Over dinner, we watch the two-humped camels of the Gobi Desert stride across the landscape, an occasional round yurt tent of the nomadic Mongolians on a hilltop next to a corral of yaks. We're rolling through a wonderfully exotic near-wasteland.
"Ladies and gentlemen, on your left, the same thing as on your right, and on your right, the same thing as on your left," jokes J.J. Johnson, a retired United Parcel Service manager from Kalamazoo, Mich.
Like all the meals to come on the train, dinner tonight is serviceable, though hardly gourmet: carrot salads thick with mayonnaise, vegetable soups, cutlets. Then again, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, a five-course meal that doesn't give you dysentery is a pretty amazing thing. Plus, there's premium vodka served from bottles frozen into blocks of ice to wash everything down.
I return to my cabin to find the bed readied for the night. The window is blowing in a cooling evening breeze. A knock on my door.
It's Viktor Malyguina, the tall blond 20-something who along with blond, small wife Anna serves as the husband-and-wife team of attendants for our car.
"Can I get you some tea? " he asks. I nod and soon he's back with an ornate glass-and-metal mug of Earl Grey. I drop in a couple of lumps of sugar, stir, sip and watch the sun set behind the dunes.

MONGOLIA: RED HERO LAND
The sour is followed by the sweet. If Erlian is the worst day of the trip, then Mongolia is the best. Just being here is amazing in itself: Ulan Bator - the name just drips with the exotic. It means "Red Hero" and dates only to the country's communist revolution in 1921. The allure of the city of 600,000 is hardly dimmed by the city's banal face -- the Stalinist architecture of the country's long period as a puppet of Moscow.
Taking in the panorama of row upon row of crumbling apartment blocks, I'm reminded of writer P.J. O'Rourke's observation: "Commies love concrete." "Welcome to `UB City,' as we call it," says our local guide, Ochir Dashnyam, looking stylish in a dark blazer and black wrap-around sunglasses.
We stop at the Soviet-style main plaza, Sukhbaatar Square, named after the first communist era leader. Like his hero, Lenin, Sukhbaatar was scrubbed, drained and pumped full of chemicals after death. His tomb, largely unvisited since the communists were removed from power in 1990, sits at the top of the square. Our group is more interested in haggling with vendors in the square to buy fuzzy hats (supposedly made of fox fur), Soviet-style military belts and brown-tinged watercolors of Gobi Desert scenes.
We stop at the Gandan Lamasery, the main temple of the "yellow head" sect of Buddhism. Unlike "red head" Buddhism, "yellow head" monks shun facial hair and do not marry. Once there were 700 monasteries in Mongolia, but the Mongolian Stalinists, in lock step with their masters in Moscow, shuttered or destroyed most of them in the 1930s, executing an estimated 14,000 monks and imprisoning thousands more.
The largest temple is home to a national treasure, the three-story tall statue of Megjid Janraisig, which symbolizes longevity. Solid copper covered in gold leaf, it's brand new. A national subscription drive paid for the statue, to replace an identical one melted down by the Russians during World War II to make bullets to shoot at the Nazis. Before lunch, we're treated to a folklore show, with Mongolian throat singing - the voice part hum, part buzzing. Its hypnotically undulating tones lull the eyelids. But the showstopper is a 7-year-old girl contortionist who slowly folds and unfolds herself into dozens of seemingly anatomically impossible shapes, at one point her chin resting on the stage, with her bottom atop her head and legs akimbo above.
"I don't know whether to wince or applaud," one of the group whispers.
An hour later, we're off-roading across a field on a treeless hillside to the yurt of 67-year-old Davaasodnom Tsermaa. He, his wife and three of his 15 grandchildren greet us. Just 20 miles from Ulan Bator's high-rises, we're in a time warp.
Tsermaa and his family move twice a year, dismantling their yurt and toting all their belongings.
"In the summer we go to the mountains, in the winter, we come to the valley," he tells me.
Life centers on raising a herd of yaks, horses and goats. But times are changing. Tsermaa's children have jobs in the city and all the grandchildren older than 6 are bused each day to school. Even Tsermaa has moved into the 21st century, pointing proudly at the solar panel atop his yurt, which powers an electric lamp inside. A split truck tire serves as the trough for the animals. As the sun settles toward the hills, the group takes turns riding a yak around the farms or holding a tiny baby goat that yelps nonstop for its mother. Tsermaa's grandchildren are plied with chocolate, gum and pens, while the train doctor stops in to see Tsermaa's wife and give her a few herbal remedies for her aches and pains.
Back on the train, the cool weather has made the compartments comfortable. Many passengers opt for the opulent un-air-conditioned dining car. The train is happy, abuzz with the amazing sights and sounds of the day.
"I just want to see everything, everything," enthuses Juanita Zasorin of Inglewood, Fla. "I don't want to miss one thing on the entire trip."

INTO SIBERIA: THE POLICE ARE EARLY RISERS
Borders are the bane of travelers, and today we rise at 4:30 a.m., hiding behind our bed sheets in our underwear as the Mongolian border police check our exit visas. A fitful 90 minutes of sleep before there's a bang on the door. The Russians want to check our entry visas.
Groggy, I pull open the shade. The rolling Wyoming-like steppes of Mongolia are gone. We're in an almost alpine world as we clickety-clack alongside the Selenga River. Yurts have been replaced by dark wooden houses, their shutters painted a brilliant sky blue.
All the paperwork means delays into Ulan Ude, the former "closed city" in Siberia that was once a linchpin in Cold War weapons production. In the bad old days, it was strictly off-limits to foreigners like us. Now, the factories lie silent and smashed, their workers gone. It's hot again, much to the disappointment of the group. The streets of the city of 400,000 are filled with cottonwood fluff falling down from the trees.
"See, it snows in Siberia, just like we expected," says Bob Schultz of Waukesha, Wis.
The day turns out to be pretty much of a dud. Our late arrival means we hurry from sight to sight - a half-hour at a folklore exhibit, where a few passengers get up to dance with the local music troupe. Five minutes at the world's largest Lenin head. A 15-minute stop at Ivolginsky Datsan monastery, the seat of Buddhism in Russia. We arrive so late all the monks have gone to their residence for the day, leaving only a straggle of groundskeepers amid the gold-domed temples. Then it's back to the train. We pass a statue of Lenin with his arm outstretched.
"Mr. Lenin says goodbye and come again," our guide quips.
Sorry, Vladimir, but Ulan Ude, we hardly knew you.

LAKE BAIKAL: THE OTHER GREAT LAKE
It's a little over 125 miles to Lake Baikal, so most of the night the train sits in the station.
The good news is, no rocking and rolling to keep passengers awake. The bad news is, a female dispatcher and her male counterpart harangue each other over loudspeakers much of the night. Luckily I have some plugs I bought at a gun store in Orange County to stuff in my ears. I sleep all right, but the other haggard passengers over breakfast the next morning are ruefully discussing the argument between "Stalin and his wife." Lake Baikal is one of those stupifyingly huge natural wonders with an impossibly long resume: third-largest lake in the world (after the Caspian Sea and Lake Superior). The world's oldest lake. The deepest lake. Twenty percent of the fresh water in the world, enough to supply the world for 40 years. As long as the trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Eighty species of lake life exist nowhere else in the world. Its surface freezes so solid in the minus-40 winter that cars and trains have been able to cross it (though scores of cars and at least one locomotive sit at its bottom). It's amazingly beautiful and teeth-chattering cold. Legend says that if you put a hand in the lake, you'll add a year to your life.
Step into the lake and you get five years more. Go all the way in and you'll add 25 years.
"Some people claim it will also make you a virgin again," a passenger jokes. 
In June, the water is 40 degrees. But when we stop at the tiny village of Polovinka, three hardy passengers (including Register photographer Bruce Strong) jump in, becoming instant goose-bump colonies. I settle for dunking my feet, then wandering around the wooden houses and watching the local women fetch water from a creek running into the lake.
"Here, despite the promises of 70 years of communism to improve everyone's life, there is still no running water, though there is electricity," says Nina Olehova, one of our Russian train guides. I visit a lady named Olga, who was born in the village and still lives there 70 years later. She has a religious icon in a corner of the room, something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, when such things were kept hidden away.
Another day, another bus. At Port Baikal, we're back into traditional tour mode. But I'm pleasantly surprised by Andrey Ivanov, our guide. His English is excellent and for once we have someone with a bit of humor leading us around. He asks if we've been to Russia before. 
"Oh, no, once is enough," one woman on the bus chimes up in the best "ugly American" tradition.
"Behave yourself - you are in Siberia and we still have salt mines," he says. "Be good or we can arrange a three-year tour for you." The bus weaves through a group of cows that have decided to sun themselves on the road, past a car that has smashed into one, shattering the back window. We stop at a small museum dedicated to the history and ecology of the lake. Someone asks Ivanov if there is a monster legend like Loch Ness in Scotland.
"There is no such creature, though they say if you drink enough vodka, you may indeed see the Lake Baikal Monster," he says.
The day ends with an excellent vodka-drenched dinner at a lakeside hotel and the rousing music of a traditional Russian folk band that has people up and clapping. Nicholas Zasorin, 86, a Russian migr, sings and sways to the music of his long-departed parents. The hydrofoil takes us home to our train across the lake, the endless summer sun hanging high in the sky even though its past 10 p.m. Lake Baikal is followed by a busy day running around Irkutsk, the nearby capital of Eastern Siberia.
We hold candles at a service at Znamensky Orthodox Church, visit  another wooden architecture museum and see the grave of Gregory Shelekhov, who colonized Alaska for Russia. A lovely if overheated evening concert leaves all but the most avid classical music buffs droopy-eyed noodles. When the champagne toast comes at the end, we look like toast.

ON THE TRAIN: THAT MAGIC FEELING - NOWHERE TO GO
Today is the day most passengers have been secretly longing for. No buses. No walking. No tours. Just a full day on the train, rumbling across the Siberian forest. A chance to break out the books, snooze, play cards or just stare out the window. In the modern world, having nothing to do for a whole day is a great guilty pleasure.
"This is what I came to see - the miles and miles of Siberian forest," says Emory Simmons, of Crawfordsville, Ind.
Don Norby, the guy from Kona, sings a spirited rendition of "Hello, Dolly! " in the bar car, earning the applause of the crowd.
John Bowers of Henderson, Nev., shows pictures of the trip that he's taken with a digital camera on his laptop computer. There's a series of shots of people riding the yak in Mongolia.
"Seems like a long time ago," Bowers says.
There's time to sit and talk with the other passengers and our Russian guides. Our guide Nina has spent all her life under the Soviet system and is glad to be done with it, for the most part.
"If I could only add up the hours of my life that I have wasted standing in line," she says.
But she also admits that not everything about the new Russia is pleasing.
"Americans want you to say that everything is better now than it was," she says. "For the most part this is true, I do not want to go back.
But it is sad to see all the poor people now. I fear we could go back to totalitarianism because the people want stability." The next day, we stop for a couple of hours for a tour of Novosibirsk, a blandly modern city with one pretty church. The town square is filled with huge "heroic" statues of squat peasant and worker women, which the locals derisively call "Brezhnev's girlfriends" after the last anti-reform leader of the Soviet Union.
The unexpected low light of the trip comes when we pass a dead homeless man on the steps of the train station, the police surveying the scene but doing nothing to either cover or move the corpse. Then it's back on the train for 36 hours of watching the birch trees, carpets of yellow and blue wildflowers and occasional villages along the rail line to Moscow.

YAROSLAVL: THE CITY OF CHURCHES AND CATS 
We cross the Ural Mountains, out of Asia and into Europe. The trip is winding down and there's an air of melancholy among even those who have complained most vociferously about the discomforts.
For those of us who longed to see this unique and different world, it's depressing to pull into Yaroslavl on the Volga River and see a McDonald's, complete with drive-through window. It's our first since Beijing. We're re-entering the orbit of "civilization," or at least the increasingly culturally homogenized world of "the West. " Even the local bank ATM takes my Wells Fargo card and spits out rubles.
Each of the cities along the way has been fascinating, but Yaroslavl is the first truly beautiful place we've visited since boarding the train. It's another big city - 630,000 people, but its spread out along the Volga River with a high bank lined with linden trees and old mansions. We arrive the day after the two military academies - one for engineers, another for accountants - have had their graduations, so young men in smart military uniforms wander the city.
During the 17th century, more than 50 churches were built. The onion-domed masterpieces of Russia's short, late renaissance are the city's most enduring landmark. It's also famed for the many feral felines who feed off the vermin attracted by the river and port.
"Yaroslavl is the city of churches and cats," says our guide.
"There are so many cathedrals that we say this or that one is `ABC' – `Another Beautiful Church'. "The United Nations is sponsoring the restoration of the icon-filed Church of the Transfiguration, which the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had wanted pulled down in the 1930s. In the end he relented to local pleas and simply had it transformed into a Museum of Atheism.
Walking through a riverfront park, we come upon a bridal party stopping at the World War II monument to lay a rose and have their picture taken.
"Without religion and war, there wouldn't be much to see in this town," joked Ramsey Su.
Back to the train, where our empty bags, in storage the whole trip, are in our compartments. We have to pack and be ready to leave early tomorrow morning. Most of the passengers skip the last event of the tour, a choral concert by a famed local group called Glas.
About two dozen others and I go - there are more singers than audience members. But the group still performs a soaring concert of unaccompanied church music, the deep and resonant notes striking the right chord of longing and regret for the curtain call of our trip.

MOSCOW: THE END OF THE LINE
It's just a few hours to the Russian capital and by early morning, we're passing kilometer marker No.1 – the last of the 7,865 we've passed. We pull into the cavernous train station, the giant letters spelling MOCKBA atop the terminal. The porters grab our bags and the strangers, now friends, swap last-minute addresses before splitting up.
In the end, most of the passengers I speak to, while wishing they had been better prepared for the heat, are glad they came.
"I came to see Mongolia and the small cities of Russia," says Jerry Journeay of Palm Springs. "The train and the heat are really a small part of the trip for me. It's the places I came to see and the places I'll remember. In that regard, the trip has given me 110 percent - beyond my expectations." Me, too. I sweated off 5 pounds, learned to loathe tour buses and don't care if I ever see diced carrots in mayonnaise or fish in aspic again. But even these shortcomings make for good travel tales.
What's left is the amazing world I saw - from the Great Wall to the Gobi Desert, the chanting monks of Ulan Bator and the smashed up Soviet military might outside Ulan Ude. The lingering hours-long midsummer's sunset over Lake Baikal, the endless miles of Siberian forest and the gold-domed churches on the Volga.
In a homogenized world in which all the rough edges have been rubbed away, the train across China, Mongolia, Siberia and Russia was a throwback. A great journey, with a few wrinkles and bumps in the road. As much as any organized tour can be, it was also an adventure. A hard thing to come by in the modern world.
The same two trains run each year between Moscow and Beijing - via the Silk Route. Samarkand. Tashkent. The great west of China. As soon as I can scrounge up enough rubles and yuan for the fare, sign me up. Only this time, I'll bring some short pants, T-shirts and a battery-operated fan.

GETTING THERE: 
Uniworld, a long-established tour company based in Los Angeles, has exclusive rights (in USA and Canada) to the Beijing-Moscow run of the two trains described in the story. Uniworld can be reached at (800) 360-9550, or check www.cruiseuniworld.com  The last Beijing-Moscow trip of 2000 leaves Aug. 3. Details of the 2001 schedule have not been finalized.

PAYING THE FREIGHT in 2000: 
Rates are $8,998 per person, based on double-occupancy. The price includes air fare from the United States to Beijing and Moscow to the United States, three nights deluxe hotel in Beijing, 10 nights on the two trains, most meals, transfers, guides, entertainment and onboard lectures. Supplements for single-occupancy in train and hotel: $1,098. Upgrade to deluxe accommodations: $998. Upgrade to business class on flights: $2,800.

Add-on tours to Shanghai and Xian in China and to Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia are available. Uniworld will assist in obtaining the necessary visas.

Note: Suggested gratuities for train and guide staff of about $150 per traveler are not included.

GETTING CASH: If you plan to do any shopping, bring along at least $400 in cash - including at least $100 in one-dollar bills.

Dollars will buy you more than Chinese yuan or Russian rubles would, and there are few places that take credit cards or traveler's checks along the tour.

A CHEAPER WAY: 
Individual travel on scheduled trains on the Trans-Siberian Railway is possible. Check with the Russia National Group tourism office in New York, toll free at (877) 221-7120. Red Star Travel in Seattle, Wash., organizes tours using scheduled state railway trains. The Moscow-Beijing tour costs $2,880 per person and includes stops in Lake Baikal, Ulan Bator and Beijing. Call (800) 215-4378.

LOOK IT UP: The one "must have" book for the trip is "Trans-Siberian Handbook" by Bryn Thomas (Trailblazer Books, $18.95). An outstanding kilometer-by-kilometer guide to the entire route, plus profiles of key cities and information on how to book trains, get visas and stay healthy. The fifth edition was released in June 2000.