I Travelled To The Coldest City On The Planet (Yakutsk, Russia)

Minus 51 degrees celsius. There is a city in Russia, more specifically Siberian Russia, which is the most isolated city on the planet. With temperatures going as low as minus 64 degrees celsius. My hand is really cold. They're tingling a bit. Oh my god, ******* hell. Frostbite forms in minutes. Eyelashes freeze in seconds. The most dangerous roads on the planet. But a place that 300,000 people call home. This is unbearable. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Yakutsk. The coldest city on the planet. This might be one of the only times where I'm going away and I'm gonna miss the horrible British weather. Now getting to this city is incredibly difficult. First was a six-hour flight to Istanbul, Turkey. Then from Turkey was a five-hour flight to Moscow, Russia. Oh my god, even here it's freezing. That next morning we drove to a different airport. Thank you very much. Why is there no one here? This was where I was boarding the final eight-hour flight to Yakutsk. For thousands of miles, there was nothing but ice. And eight hours later, after crossing the Siberian desert, I saw light. We're here. Welcome to Yakutsk. The temperature is 42 degrees below zero. The welcome time is 6.38. This is inside. It's the weirdest airport exit. It's a bit of a ghost town. I was now about to head outside for the first time in Yakutsk. My name is Joe. Good to meet you. This was Siam, by the way. He was our translator. My f***ing... Oh my god, it's hard to breathe. Minus 39 degrees Celsius. Quickly after walking outside, we had to head to the car. You see, all I was wearing was a singular coat and staying outside for any longer than just that was very dangerous. Oh, are you okay? Give me your hand. Give me your hand, I'll help you up. Is this the car? Can't complain at this, can we? Just look at that. I'm gonna get some sleep and then check out Yakutsk. Let me show you what you've got to wear to survive in this temperature. What do you think of the fit? I am boiling right now. 13 additional layers on top of your normal clothes. The cold air just attacks your face. Any exposed skin, it just starts stinging a bit. Minus 41 degrees Celsius today. Would you say minus 41 for Yakutsk? Is that cold? That's usual. The car has literally just disappeared into the abyss. And after walking around for only about 20 minutes, just look at the state of my hat, my eyelashes, my gloves have completely frozen over. It is very, very cold. Can we go inside? My hand is really cold. Can we go inside for a second? F***ing hell. Like they're tingling a bit. F***ing hell. In the space of a few seconds, my hands had gone from incredibly cold to just completely numb. I couldn't feel them at all. Your fingertips are very, very pink and cold. Frostbite here is incredibly common. Is it okay? Yeah. Luckily, I just got first degree frostbite, which is recoverable. Look at the difference in colour. This is the hand that felt cold and tingly. This is the other hand. I had to sit in that coffee shop for a good 30 minutes to let my body heat up. Once I've had a friend who was missing five of his toes on his left leg. He was running barefoot for like two minutes in the winter. And he lost all his toes on his left foot. Yeah. There are so many extra challenges which need to be faced living in this city. But what do the locals have to say about living here? How is life living in the coldest city on the planet? So you like the cold? Really? Oh, wow. The verdict I got was that no one here was fazed by the cold. Do you find living here tough? I mean, me personally, I don't understand how you could get used to this. But then I met this guy. What made you move to Yakutsk in the first place? So what was the crime that he committed, Sayan? As much as obviously that's awful. In context to this video, he committed a crime. Tried to run away to the most isolated city on earth, aka Yakutsk, in hopes he wouldn't get caught. Eventually got caught here. Served 20 years. When he got out, he was so used to the cold that he decided to stay. Do you enjoy living in Yakutsk? Yeah? Our life is not that different from yours. Just a little bit colder. A city frozen in ice, but behind it all, just a normal city. Delicious. It is currently minus 41 degrees Celsius here in Yakutsk. Let me show you some cool things you can do here. First, it's a hot water experiment. Boiling hot water. A normal banana. Obviously, I took a bite out of it just before. And then I left it on an open window for 15 minutes. Okay. Completely frozen solid. Next, hot noodles. You leave it like this for a few minutes. Oh, get the hat. Completely frozen solid. One of my favorite Young LA t-shirts here. And after leaving it to dry for literally only a minute. That is mad. And as the sun set in Yakutsk, I got into some fresh clothes, laid up over that, went on a night out. This is warm for us. This is warm? Yeah. Is this warm? Yeah, you can eat ice cream. I am literally freezing my tits off right now. We're currently heading back from the night out. It's got to be like the weirdest like walk back for a night out ever. Yeah, if we pass out right now, we're f***ed. That next day, my translator Sayan said he had a surprise for me. Thank you. No way. They've got a proper gym and everything. Inside this sports hall are some of the finest athletes in Yakutsk. Training for Yakutsk's national sport. Mass wrestling. Here's how it works. Two athletes sit facing each other with their feet braced against a board. They both grip a short wooden stick. The goal is to pull the stick away from your opponent or pull them across the board. Is it me against him? I had been challenged. Nice to meet you. Somehow I actually won. Well played. The world champion wants to play me. I've been told this guy here was the world champion of mass wrestling. That guy there, he's the world champion. Your champion. World champion. Wow. Now he wanted to play me. Good luck. This was a best of three game. One nil to the champ. He just destroyed me. I don't know how I won that, but now it was one all. It was now the deciding round. The world champion won it. Well played, my man. Set and play. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is Yakutsk's national sport. The city is clearly doing fine, but what about the little villages dotted around Siberia, isolated on their own, truly in the middle of nowhere? All right, it's pretty early right now. We're currently about to embark on a six-hour road trip deep into Siberia to a small remote village. How cold is the village? Minus 50 almost. Minus 50. Maybe minus 61. It feels like minus 61. It feels like minus 61? Yes. Pretty nervous about this one, I'll be honest. How safe are the roads here in Siberia? So the further out we go, the more dangerous the roads get. Brilliant. Due to the extreme cold, the steam coming from other cars really affected the visibility. This wasn't even a road anymore. The ground was literally ice and snow. A remote road in the depths of Siberia. What was I expecting, to be honest? But by some miracle, after several hours, we had arrived. Sasha is a local of this village. Minus 50 degrees Celsius. Feels like minus 61. Is this cold for you? Just look at this place. You can't see anything ahead of you. That jump from minus 40 yesterday to minus 50 today was very noticeable. The village is so much colder. But with it being completely isolated hundreds of miles away from the city, how different is life here? Sasha had kindly invited me into her home where lunch was already prepared. Now unlike in the city, the diet of the villagers is all just food that they've sourced themselves. Fish shavings are one of the most popular meals that people eat and you just eat it frozen. It just tastes like an ice cube dipped in salt. Okay, I wasn't the biggest fan of the fish shavings, but a lot of this food was delicious. I'll show you. Now for the water that I'm drinking. I'm standing on a lake right now, obviously completely frozen, and this is where they get their drinking water from. The frozen lake is cut up into ice blocks. You cannot get much purer than that. Every family has a weekly stash of ice, which if they want to start drinking, they bring it inside and let it melt. This is the only option because piping systems would just freeze up. And due to the limited water, showers are not a thing here. Special types of saunas are used where the intense heat is meant to cleanse open pores and detoxify the body using a fraction of the water that a shower would. If you're rich in the village, you'll have a private sauna like this one, but most go to the public sauna. And if you need the toilet at any point... That was a unique experience. Sewage systems also don't exist here because it's physically too cold. So you go into one of these shacks outside, do your business into a hole in the ground, and that business freezes instantly. So there's no smell. I have a present for you. You have a present? Yeah. Oh, okay. It's a bear meat. Bear meat? Bear meat. No way. But our bears pose a big threat in this village. Don't give this meat to the women. Oh, so only men can eat the bear meat. Thank you very much. Thank you. I don't taste anything. No flavor. I mean, there's not really much to say about it. You could say the food is bear. Apart from that dog, you can hear a pin drop. I was literally walking in one of the most isolated places on the planet. How do you get electricity to this remote place? The electricity lines go on for hundreds of miles back to Yakutsk. You've got everything you need here? How do you like living here in this small village in the middle of nowhere? Well, there's definitely a lot of challenges which this village faces due to the extreme cold and extreme isolation. The people I met all just seemed so happy. We are living, not surviving. I mean, I guess out here, cut off from almost everything, there's a sense of peace that you can't get anywhere else in the world.