At minus 5C, the cold is quite refreshing and a light hat and scarf are all that's required to keep warm. At minus 20C, the moisture in your nostrils freezes, and the cold air starts making it difficult not to cough. At minus 35C, the air will cold enough to numb exposed skin quickly, making frostbite a constant hazard. And at minus 45C, even wearing glasses gets tricky: the metal sticks to your cheeks and will tear off chunks of flesh when you decide to remove them.Yakutsk is a remote city in Eastern Siberia (population 200,000) famous for two things: appearing in the classic board game Risk, and the fact that it can, convincingly, claim to be the coldest city on earth. In January, the most freezing month, average "highs" are around minus 40C; today the temperature is hovering around minus 43C, leaving the city engulfed in an oppressive blanket of freezing fog that restricts visibility to 10 metres.Locals claim that there are enough lakes and rivers in the region for each inhabitant to have one of each. They are fond of boasting that the region contains every element in the periodic table. According to local legend, the god of creation had been flying around the world to distribute riches and natural resources, but when he got to Yakutia he got so cold that his hands went numb and he dropped everything.Yakutsk's remoteness is also extraordinary. It is six time zones away from Moscow, and two centuries ago it would have taken more than three months to travel between the two. Now, it takes just six hours in a ropey Tupolev plane, but tickets start at £500 return, a huge sum in a country where the average wage is £250 per month. There is no railway to Yakutsk. The other options are a 1,000-mile boat ride up the Lena river during the few months of the year when it isn't frozen, or the "Road of Bones".In Yakutsk itself, most of the cars are second-hand Japanese imports; apparently, they handle the cold better than Ladas and other traditional Russian vehicles. Still, local people habitually leave the engines running if they have to stop off for half an hour, and some leave them on all day while at work to stop them conking out and to make driving bearably warm. The overworked exhausts add to the fog that clings to the city.
