Welcome to the Coldest Place on Earth
Welcome to the village in Russia’s Sakha Republic with an undisputed place in the record books
FOR MOST PEOPLE, THE VILLAGE OF OYMYAKON
wouldn’t be a top-of-the-list travel destination. It is the world’s coldest permanently settled area, located a few hundred kilometres from the Arctic Circle in the Russian tundra. But for New Zealand photographer Amos Chapple, it offered an opportunity he couldn’t refuse.
Working as an English teacher in Russia to support his travel photography, Chapple viewed a trip to Oymyakon, which has set records as one of the coldest places people live on Earth, as a chance to embark on a unique photography project.
A temperature of -67.8°C was recorded in 1933 at Oymyakon’s weather station, while a temperature of -71.2°C was noted in 1924. But Chapple first had to get himself to Yakutsk in northeastern Russia, the region’s capital city, six time zones away from Moscow.
Temperatures drop to around -40°C during January in Yakutsk, but despite its harsh conditions, it is an economically vibrant place, settled in large part due to an abundance of natural resources around it – diamonds, oil and gas are all plentiful.
Oymyakon, on the other hand, boasts just one major road leading in and out of it. Known as the ‘Road of Bones’, it was built by Gulag inmates under Stalin’s regime. The skeletons of the prisoners who died during its construction were used in its foundations. Oymyakon is some 1000 km from Yakutsk and, in order to reach it, Chapple had to travel for two days, via a combination of shared vans and hitchhiking.
At one point, he found himself stranded at a petrol station. “I was eating reindeer meat for two days,” Chapple says, recalling the small café and teahouse, ironically named Café Cuba, that served as his sole option for food during that time. “Reindeer was the staple meat of the tundra.”
Reindeer isn’t the only thing that inhabitants of this ice-covered region eat, but their diet is meatheavy. Chapple also ate a dish of macaroni pasta and frozen chunks of horse blood, as well as a Yakutian speciality of thinly shaved frozen fish.
“It’s basically like frozen sashimi, and it’s divine,” he says. “Somehow the texture of the frozen fish, with the warm bits at the end, is very distinctive and delicious.”
WHEN HE ARRIVED IN OYMYAKON, WHERE the population hangs at around 500 permanent inhabitants, Chapple was struck by the emptiness of the place. “The streets were just empty. I had expected that
they would be accustomed to the cold and there would be everyday life happening in the streets, but instead people were very wary of the cold,” he says. “It felt extremely desolate. It wasn’t, but everything was happening indoors, and I wasn’t welcome indoors.”
In the hours Chapple spent wandering the village streets, his main companions were street dogs or village drunks (alcoholism is rampant in Oymyakon).
Still, life in the village goes on. Schools don’t close unless the temperature falls below -40°C. Farmers bring their cows to the village’s watering hole – a ‘thermal’ spring that stays a little above freezing – then lead them back to their insulated stables.
The thermal spring is the village’s lifeblood, its entire reason for existence: reindeer herders would visit the spring in order to hydrate their animals, returning again and again until the village became a permanent settlement (in the Even language spoken in Siberia, Oymyakon means ‘unfrozen water’.)
LIVING IN THE COLDEST PERMANENTLY INHABITED place on Earth does have some distinct drawbacks, however. It’s dark – completely, utterly dark – for up to 21 hours a day during the winter. Bathrooms are mostly outdoors, because indoor plumbing presents a challenge due to frozen pipes. Residents have cars, but must leave them running outside, sometimes overnight, so the mechanics don’t freeze up. Despite this, sometimes more extreme measures are necessary.
“A guy I was staying with left his car running all night, but even so, in the morning, the drive shaft was completely frozen. Without any ceremony, he pulled out a little flamethrower, went under the truck and started fanning the bottom of his truck with a flamethrower,” Chapple says. “It’s part of the toolkit [for living in Oymyakon], a little flamethrower.”