In February 2026, we travelled to Yakutsk, Russia, before heading even further into the remote village of Oymyakon, a place often described as the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth.

We went there expecting the temperature to be the story.

And at first, it was. In a place where winter temperatures have fallen below -67°C, the cold is impossible to ignore.

Stepping outside feels less like entering bad weather and more like entering an entirely different system of living. Everyday routines that we barely think about elsewhere have to be reconsidered here.

Homes need to remain constantly heated. Transport has to be managed differently.

Food is brought in largely from the main city, much of it already frozen, and refrigeration almost feels unnecessary when the outdoors itself functions like a giant freezer.

But the longer we stayed, the less extraordinary these things seemed to the people who actually live there.

That became the real story of Oymyakon.

For us, the environment felt extreme. For the residents, it was simply home. They knew how to read the cold, how to prepare for it, how to move through it and how to structure everyday life around it.

Humans have survived some of the harshest environments on Earth not by conquering nature, but by learning to live with it.

And somewhere in this tiny, frozen village, we saw that relationship between people and nature in its most extreme and beautiful form.

What surprised us most was how quickly the numbers began to matter less.

-40°C, -50°C, -60°C — these temperatures initially sounded almost unreal.

But the memories we carried away were not really about the thermometer. They were about the people who welcomed us, spoke to us about their lives and showed us how an environment that seemed completely unfamiliar could still hold all the ordinary things that make somewhere a home.

We often think of home as a place: an address, a city, a landscape we recognise.

Oymyakon reminded us that home can also be the people who create familiarity in a place that initially feels completely foreign.

We arrived curious about how anyone could live in temperatures this extreme. We left realising that the more interesting question was not how people survive here, but how completely they have made this extraordinary place their own.