Boris Yeltsin's first recorded boat journey half a century ago was an unmitigated failure in which he caught typhoid fever. But, undaunted by past memories, the president set sail anew Thursday on a week-long Volga riverboat tour to rekindle his popular support.


"The media has been saying this is a vacation; that's a lie," Yeltsin told NTV before departing. "It's a fairly difficult working trip with traveling every day. Perhaps I will rest during the evenings."


The president will be traveling with his wife, Naina, but plans stops along the way in cities such as Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara and Rostov-on-Don to meet with local political leaders and residents.


"Since it's August, it's a relatively calm month as far as government matters are concerned; there is a possibility to carefully consider the problems of the different regions more deeply," said spokesman Anatoly Krasikov.


Yeltsin has rarely shown any special love for boating that might explain his choice of transport, although he did mention a fascination for ship-building -- reminiscent of his acknowledged hero Peter the Great -- in the first volume of his memoirs "Against the Grain."


Yet when the young Yeltsin organized a river expedition in the Ural Mountains as a ninth grader, the result was catastrophe. In his memoirs he writes that the members of the group caught typhoid fever and, after what appears to have been a lengthy expedition, were ultimately discovered unconscious by local residents. They had missed the first month of school.


Yeltsin's latest boat journey should be less traumatic.


In what aides say may be a first such trip by a Russian or Soviet leader, Yeltsin will make his working tour on a 1974-built, 40-passenger craft recently restored by Finnish workmen to include satellite links and a modern interior.


"It's a beautiful, small ship," said Grigory Kuznetsov, head of the dock in Dubna, where Yeltsin began his journey.


The 83-meter craft -- called the Rossiya -- was originally built for Leonid Brezhnev, but the Soviet leader is said never to have set foot on board. At first it was used by the Communist Party for official delegations, but after 1991 it was rented out to tourist groups, including foreigners, according to deputy director of the Moscow Shipping Company, Yury Danilunin.


The president's first main stop will be Nizhy Novgorod, where Yeltsin will visit the market to meet local people and hear about the local reform process.


"The president wants to become acquainted not only with industry, the economy, agriculture, but also with how social and social health problems are being decided, and with how people are relaxing," Krasikov said.


The trip has all the makings of a classic Yeltsin populist crowd pleaser made all the more memorable, as Izvestia put it, because "you just can't remember the top figure of the country traveling by riverboat."


Yet Yeltsin is a day behind the real mastermind of self-promotion, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who set sail on the Volga to build his political base Wednesday.