THE COLDEST JOURNEY ON EARTH.

A morning inside the Kremlin walls, an afternoon on the ice, then we board the train and the Trans-Siberian begins.

• The Armoury Chamber: Fabergé eggs, royal carriages, the Tsars' crowns.
• The Tsar Bell and the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in the Kremlin grounds.
• Gorky Park: in winter the paths freeze into a roughly 16,000 square-metre open-air rink (the largest of its kind in Europe when it opened), music and fur coats.
• Evening: board the overnight train east. From here the rail runs more than 5,000 km to Lake Baikal, the most beautiful stretch of the whole line.

Did you know: the Trans-Siberian is the longest railway on Earth. The full Moscow to Vladivostok run is 9,289 km and crosses 8 time zones.

Wake up in Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, where Orthodox Russia meets Islamic Asia. It is the most distinct city on the western leg, and one almost no group tour includes.

• The Kazan Kremlin (UNESCO): a white Orthodox cathedral and the blue-and-white Kul Sharif, the largest mosque in Russia, inside the same walls.
• The leaning Söyembikä Tower.
• The old Tatar quarter: wooden houses in bright colours.
• Tatar food found nowhere else: echpochmak, horse sausage, chak-chak.

Overnight in Kazan.

Did you know: Kazan is officially over 1,000 years old and carries the trademarked title "the Third Capital of Russia."

A fuller look at Tatarstan, then back on the train toward the Urals.

• Sviyazhsk: the island-fortress Ivan the Terrible built in 1551 to take Kazan, a UNESCO site of white churches rising from the frozen Volga.
• The Temple of All Religions and the Kremlin embankment back in the city.
• Evening: board the overnight train east.

The train crosses the Urals, the line between Europe and Asia, and stops at Yekaterinburg, the city where the Romanov dynasty ended.

• Watch for the white border obelisk as you cross from Europe into Asia.
• The Church on the Blood: built on the spot where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed in July 1918.
• Ganina Yama: seven wooden chapels in the birch forest, one for each Romanov, where the bodies were taken.

The heaviest, quietest stop on the line. Overnight in Yekaterinburg.

A slow morning in the Ural capital, then onto the legendary Rossiya for the two-night run deep into Siberia.

• The Europe/Asia border monument and the city: wooden houses, Soviet concrete, glass towers side by side.
• Board the Rossiya (Train 001) in the afternoon.
• Settle into the platzkart open berth; the taiga, the great rivers and the descent to Baikal lie ahead.

A full day on the train, and this is the experience, not something to endure.

• The Siberian taiga: the world's largest forest, rolling past for thousands of kilometres.
• River crossings: the Ob at Novosibirsk, the Yenisei at Krasnoyarsk.
• Platform stops of 20 to 50 minutes: smoked omul and pirozhki from the babushkas.
• The dining car, the provodnitsa's samovar tea, and families, soldiers and locals sharing the open berths.

By evening the line begins its long descent toward Lake Baikal.

Off the train at Irkutsk, the "Paris of Siberia," then a drive to Lake Baikal and across the ice to Olkhon Island, the sacred heart of the lake.

• Baikal: the world's deepest lake (1,642 m), the oldest (25 to 30 million years), holding a fifth of all the fresh water on Earth.
• By February it is frozen solid, a metre of clear ice you can drive across.
• The crossing to Olkhon is on the ice itself, a UAZ van gliding over the deepest water on the planet, the ice cracking like distant thunder.
• Optional: the historic Circum-Baikal Railway along the southern shore, the most scenic rail line in Russia.

Two nights in Khuzhir village on Olkhon.

Did you know: the water under Baikal's ice is so clear you can see roughly 40 metres straight down into the black.

★ second-half travellers fly into Irkutsk (IKT) today and join the group at Olkhon this evening.

The full Baikal ice day, the reason people fly across the world in February.

• A UAZ 4x4 across open ice to Khoboy Cape, the dramatic northern tip of Olkhon.
• The ice caves and grottoes in the coastal bays: walls of translucent blue ice hung with icicles, the most photographed sight on Baikal.
• Out on the open ice: methane bubbles frozen mid-rise, and pressure hummocks, slabs of shattered turquoise ice.
• Evening: dinner with a Buryat family in Khuzhir, omul fish, homemade pelmeni, and stories of life on the ice.

Nothing about the day feels real.

A slower morning on the island before the first half flies home.

• Shaman Rock at Cape Burkhan: the heart of Buryat shamanism and, by tradition, one of the nine sacred sites of Asia.
• A walk along the shoreline as the light moves across the ice.
• A lakeside banya: steam, a roll in the snow, back to the steam, the right way to end three days at -20°C.

Afternoon return to Irkutsk.

★ first-half travellers: your trip ends tonight in Irkutsk. You fly out of Irkutsk (IKT) on Day 11, routing home via Moscow. Full and second-half travellers continue.

A morning flight north from Irkutsk to Yakutsk, the fast way into the deep cold, and you land in the coldest city on Earth.

• Yakutsk: the world's coldest city, the largest built entirely on permafrost, around 370,000 people.
• February reality: -40°C is a normal afternoon, -45°C is not unusual, and eyelashes freeze in seconds.
• Throw hot tea into the air and it vanishes as a cloud of ice crystals (you will do this, on camera).
• Cars run for hours because the engines will not restart; buildings stand on stilts so they do not melt the permafrost.

Layered up you will be fine; the city is built around moving through cold most people will never feel.

★ the Pole of Cold core begins

A full day in Yakutsk, into the permafrost and the age of mammoths.

• The Kingdom of Permafrost: an underground ice tunnel held at -10°C year-round, the only place on Earth where stepping out into -40°C feels warm.
• The Mammoth Museum: real tusks, bones and frozen specimens pulled from the permafrost; Siberia is the world's greatest mammoth archive.
• Evening: Sakha cuisine, stroganina (thin-shaved frozen raw fish), horse meat and black bread, food built for extreme cold.

Drive out onto the frozen Lena River to the Lena Pillars, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

• Columns of limestone, 150 to 300 metres tall, rising straight off the riverbank.
• The rock is about 500 million years old; the pillar shapes were carved by frost and the river over the last few hundred thousand years.
• In February the river is the road, a frozen highway you drive on, the pillars rising above.

Back to Yakutsk to prepare; tomorrow the Road of Bones begins.

Did you know: the Lena is one of the longest rivers on Earth, and in winter its ice is thick enough to carry fuel trucks.

We leave Yakutsk in heated 4x4s and start east on the Kolyma Highway, the road the world calls the Road of Bones.

• Built by gulag prisoners under Stalin in the 1930s and 40s; the men who died were laid into the roadbed, so the highway is literally built on bones.
• Cross the frozen Lena and Aldan rivers, the rivers are the bridges in winter.
• Into the Verkhoyansk Range: wooden settlements, woodsmoke, snowmobiles parked at every door.

Overnight in Khandyga. The trip stops being a journey and becomes an expedition.

The hardest and most spectacular driving day, over the mountains and down into the cold trap.

• Climb the Verkhoyansk passes and drop into the Oymyakon valley, where still air and high mountains concentrate cold like nowhere else.
• The thermometer falls as you descend: -45, -50, -55.
• Black river ice and the famous Road-of-Bones passes between the peaks.

By evening, Oymyakon. There are no hotels; you stay in a homestay with the families who live in the coldest inhabited place on Earth.

A full day at the Pole of Cold, the brag the whole trip is built around.

• The Pole of Cold monument: stand for a photograph almost nobody on Earth has.
• Even reindeer herders and local families.
• Ice fishing on the frozen Indigirka: cut a hole, drop a line, and the fish freezes solid the moment it hits the air.
• The cold experiments that only work here: boiling water flung into the sky as ice crystals, a banana used as a hammer, a shirt that stands up frozen.

Oymyakon's official record low is -67.7°C (1933); a monument in the village marks an unofficial -71.2°C estimated on a 1926 expedition, which, if real, would be the coldest ever recorded in an inhabited place. You will not meet many people who have stood here.

Did you know: the school in Oymyakon only closes when it drops below -52°C, and around 500 people still call it home.

We turn back west, re-crossing the passes and the Road of Bones in the opposite light.

• The same brutal landscape, now familiar, the cab warm, the group quiet and changed.
• Stops at the points you passed in the dark: gulag memorial markers, frozen river crossings, the loneliest fuel stop in Russia.

Overnight again in Khandyga.

The final leg of the Road of Bones, back across the Aldan and Lena ice to Yakutsk.

• After days in the cold trap, Yakutsk at -40°C feels almost mild.
• A hot banya, real beds, and a last Sakha dinner together.

We made it out and back.

Final morning in Yakutsk.

• If there is time, the Lena River embankment as the low sun crawls sideways across the horizon.
• Flights home route through Moscow and connect onward.

Fly out having crossed Russia from Red Square to the Pole of Cold, in the season most travellers are too scared to attempt. End of journey.