“Vladivostok?” Yuri-the-retired-train-driver’s friends giggled, emptied their glasses, and fell silent. “Ah! Well, Vladivostok...” He glanced out the window, steadying himself against the train’s rackety sway. Outside, the industrial clutter of eastern Germany had given way to the birch forests and timber shacks of rural Poland.

Yuri, who had worked the Trans-Mongolian route for 20 years until his heart told him to stop, seemed nervous on our behalf. Beijing he wouldn’t have minded, even Ulan Bator. But Vladivostok, that mafia-ridden Wild East frontier town of the New Russia? “Well,” he said, refilling our glasses, “what can I say? Good luck!”

Actually, it wasn’t quite true to describe Vladivostok as our destination; that was Tokyo, where I had an appointment with a translator. But when our journey was due to take almost as long as our time in Japan, the concept of destination – or of a holiday with a beginning and ending – was a little blurred. Which was pretty much the point of deciding not to fly in the first place.

Our journey had begun on the Eurostar, which, with imaginative use of the bar, can always be treated as the departure lounge of any European train journey. A light supper, a beer, a sunset, and before we knew it we were in Brussels, waiting for the overnight train to Berlin; an overnight train that was the finest of the whole journey, complete with plump white duvets, decent showers and breakfast in bed. A day spent wandering around Berlin, stocking up on cheese, bread and pastries, and then the overnight-plus-a-day train across Poland and Belarus, where we met Yuri and his friends.

A few days in Moscow – Red Square, St Basil’s, a well-dressed elderly beggar quoting Orwell and Churchill, a shop selling a Kalashnikov-shaped vodka bottle, which I came perilously close to buying – and then we boarded the mother of all long-distance trains, the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Vladivostok, where a slow boat to Japan was waiting for us at the end of an even slower six-day journey across Russia’s vast expanse.

From our surprisingly spacious compartment (OK, it was tiny, but we did at least have a narrow bed each, which converted back to a seat by day) we sat and watched Russia roll past. The mildewed tower blocks and homeless camps of outer Moscow, the dacha colonies, the birch forests and farmland, the derelict factories in the middle of nowhere, the carts loaded with firewood at level crossings, the bridges across mile-wide rivers, the long stretches of bare boggy ground... and that was only the first day.

Life on a long-distance train soon settles into a comfortable routine. You sleep a lot, read a lot (Great Russian Novels are a popular choice, although somehow there’s never enough time to finish them), make conversation with your fellow travellers, play cards, and sleep some more. Two or three times a day the train stops for long enough to allow you out on to the platform, to stretch your legs, practise your Russian and stock up on supplies: boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, freshly baked bread, beer and mineral water, giant teddy bears (no, I don’t know either).

These stops also allow you to see the changes marking your journey eastwards – changes in climate and architecture, in the produce sold on the platform and in the people selling it – as Europe gives way to the Caucasus and Siberia, and as Mongolian and then Chinese influences come to predominate. Japan was still two days over the horizon by the time we got to the Pacific, but it felt a lot closer than it would have from Heathrow.

It was five in the morning when we pulled into Vladivostok – perfectly on time – and a cold white light washed over the grey warships in the harbour as the first trams of the day clattered into the city. We slept for a few hours at our “homestay” (a kind of informal B&B), before eating breakfast and setting out to explore the city. Despite Yuri’s dire warnings, Vladivostok is a quietly handsome place, with enough parks and restaurants and unfolding views of the bay to reward a day or two’s aimless strolling. We visited the Arsenyev museum, where we had to tread quietly for fear of waking the attendants, and the many ice-cream stalls on the beach, but mainly we just enjoyed the sensation of walking on solid ground again.

The sensation was short-lived – by nine the following evening we were on a ferry heading out of the bay, a mere 38 hours from Japan and journey’s end. “End” being a relative term here, since after three weeks exploring the gardens, tea-rooms and karaoke bars of Japan, we would be boarding a ship to the Chinese port of Tianjin, a minibus to Beijing, and the No 3 train for Moscow and home, a journey on which we would see Tiananmen Square, the Mongolian steppes, and the full flourish of summer in Siberia. But that’s another story.

Docking in Fushiki, on the western coast of Japan, was an impressively moving experience – the sense of arrival, of having truly made a journey, was almost overwhelming.

We had certainly avoided any chance of jet lag. A 12-day expedition in place of a 12-hour flight may not seem all that practical, but if you want to get more out of your journey than a visit to duty-free and a view of some clouds, or if you want to put your destination into some geographical and cultural context, try not flying for a change. After all, if Jules Verne had written Around the World in 80 Hours, it wouldn’t have been much of a story.

Need to know

Deutsche Bahn (booking line: 0871 8808066, 6p/min or e-mail: sales@bahn.co.uk) can book London-Moscow via Brussels and Berlin from £172 or from £337.40 for first-class Eurostar and single sleepers on the Brussels-Berlin and Berlin and Moscow night trains; Moscow- Vladivostok from £515.10 in a single sleeper; £358.13 in a double sleeper.
More information: www.seat61.com/ Trans-Siberian.htm; www.trans-siberian.info.

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