From now on, if I ever feel a bit nippy and have to don an extra pair of socks, I will have a look at these images of the coldest town on earth – Oymyakon and get a grip of myself. Here temperatures can reach below -70 degrees centigrade which I literally can not compute. The average temperature in January is -50C. That’s the average.
In this Siberian ice-box cars have to be left running otherwise the fuel tanks will freeze. Digging a grave can take three days because they have to soften the earth with fire and hot coals first. I guess the corpse isn’t likely to start decomposing though.
The locals (there’s a population of around 500) survive by eating reindeer and horse meat and very little else. Not even onions can be bothered to grow when it’s that cold.
Because of their northerly position they get big swings in day lengths. From 3 hours in winter to a wonderful 21 hours of light in the summer; the temperature can reach 30C+ in the summer. Oymyakon started out as a stopover point for reindeer herders, but in a move by the Soviets to stop nomadic lifestyles they turned it into a permanent town.
Paradoxically Oymyakon actually means “unfrozen patch of water; place where fish spend the winter” because of a local thermal spring that stays fluid despite the frosty efforts of this winter wonderland. Having said that another source says it may well have come from a mispelling of a word that means “frozen lake” which makes more sense, but who knows.
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There’s just one shop and one school. The school only shuts if temperatures sink below -52C.
No one has central heating and most people’s bogs are still outhouses. It’s so cold that pen ink solidifies, glasses freeze to people’s faces and batteries lose charge.
Oymyakon is two hours drive from Yakutsk, the province’s capital and the coldest city on earth.
The so called “road of bones“, constructed in Stalin’s era, travels 1900 Km in total across to the far east of Russia. It’s so called because when people died in the harsh conditions whilst constructing the road they were simply included into the road’s make-up. The ground was too hard to bury people in, so they figured they would make them part of the road itself.
Tourists often visit this outpost of humanity to experience the cold, but few stick around long…
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