RUSSIA TRANS-SIBERIAN.

A full day inside the Hermitage Museum , the former Winter Palace of the Russian Tsars. Three million works of art spread across 365 rooms. You won't see everything, but you'll see the things that matter: Rembrandt, Impressionists, Scythian gold, the Peacock Clock, the throne room. After the Hermitage, Palace Square , the vast courtyard flanked by the Alexander Column and the General Staff Building. This is where Russians have protested and celebrated for centuries. Evening: St. Petersburg has one of the most respected underground club scenes in the world. Griboedov (a club inside a WWII bomb shelter), Arma17's St. Pete sister venues, Jager Bar. You don't have to go , but if you do, this is the real deal.

Morning drive to Peterhof , the palace that Peter the Great built to show Versailles who's boss. The Grand Cascade is dormant in winter (the fountains are switched off until May), but the gardens turned snowfield are arguably more striking , 64 fountain sculptures emerging from a white sheet, the Gulf of Finland frozen out to the horizon. The palace interiors glow brighter in winter; the gold leaf catches every sliver of low sun. Afternoon: Yusupov Palace on the Moika River. This is where Rasputin was killed in December 1916 , so we're visiting in roughly the same conditions he died in. The family murdered him in the basement because he simply wouldn't die , poisoned, shot, and then drowned in this very canal under the ice. The palace still has the basement room. Late evening: we board the Sapsan or overnight train to Moscow. Arrive Moscow morning.

Moscow. Red Square at walking pace, snow underfoot, breath visible. The square itself is almost a kilometre long , and every building around it is a statement. St. Basil's Cathedral (you've seen the picture, now stand in front of it with a dusting of snow on those onion domes). Lenin's Mausoleum (the man has been lying there since 1924 , the queue moves fast in February since most tourists stay home). The Kremlin walls in dark red brick rising above white cobblestones. GUM Department Store glows neon at night and turns Red Square into a winter spectacle , the lights, the fir trees, the snow. Lunch at GUM , the 19th century glass-roofed building that's part shopping mall, part architectural masterpiece. It used to be where Soviets queued for goods. Now it has Dior. Evening: Arbat Street , Moscow's oldest pedestrian street, full of street artists, bookshops, and the house where Pushkin spent his honeymoon. Walk it slowly. Then warm up in a café over honey vodka and pelmeni.

Morning: inside the Kremlin , the Armoury Chamber (Fabergé eggs, royal carriages, Tsar's crowns), the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, the Tsar Bell that's never rung. The Kremlin isn't just a symbol , it's a functioning government building and a museum. Afternoon: Gorky Park along the Moscow River. In winter the entire park transforms into one of Europe's largest open-air ice rinks , 18,000 square metres of frozen pathways, music, fairy lights, and locals skating in fur coats. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is here if you want it. A quick stop at the Tretyakov Gallery , Russia's answer to the Louvre, focused entirely on Russian art from medieval icons to 20th century avant-garde. Evening: we board Train 001, the Rossiya , Moscow's Yaroslavsky station, Platform 2. The journey to Vladivostok covers 9,288 km. The train leaves. Russia begins.

Today the train crosses the Ural Mountains , the physical boundary between Europe and Asia. Look out the window for the obelisk that marks the border: on one side, Europe; on the other, Asia. The mountains are low and forested, nothing like the Himalayas, but the symbolism is impossible. The Rossiya makes a stop at Yekaterinburg , usually 30 minutes to 2 hours. Enough time to get off, breathe non-train air, and walk five minutes to the area around the station. If the stop is long enough, the Church on the Blood is 10 minutes away: built on the exact spot where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. The end of the Romanov dynasty happened in a basement here. Back on the train. The Urals behind us. Siberia begins.

A full day on the train , and this is not something to endure. It's something to experience. Outside: the Siberian taiga. The world's largest boreal forest, stretching 5,000 km from the Urals to the Pacific. Pine trees as far as you can see, occasional wooden villages, rivers that cross the tracks at odd angles. The scale is genuinely hard to process. The dining car: samovar tea, black bread, Russian soup. The provodnitsa (train attendant) brings tea in metal holders. Other passengers , Russian families, soldiers, Siberian locals , share the open berths. Platzkart (2nd class open carriage) is the way to travel this train: it's communal, honest, and unforgettable. By evening the terrain shifts. The forests thin. We're approaching Irkutsk.

We get off at Irkutsk , the 'Paris of Siberia' , and take a minibus 60 km south to Listvyanka, the village on Lake Baikal's southern shore. Lake Baikal: the world's deepest lake at 1,642 metres. The world's oldest lake at 25–30 million years. Contains 20% of the world's fresh water. By February the surface is frozen solid , a metre of clear ice, hard enough to drive a UAZ van across. You walk on a lake. Below your boots, the deepest body of fresh water on Earth. The ice cracks like distant thunder as it shifts. We arrange a hovercraft or ice-walk, depending on conditions, plus a stop on the ice to look at methane bubbles frozen in place mid-rise , one of Baikal's most photographed phenomena. Listvyanka village: wooden houses with smoke rising from chimneys, smoked omul fish (the local Baikal fish that tastes like salmon-trout), the Limnological Museum, and a banya (Russian sauna) on the shore , the best way to cap a day at −20°C. Evening: return to Irkutsk. Rest. Tomorrow the train continues east.

Board the train again from Irkutsk. The landscape shifts from pine forest to something more open , the edges of the Mongolian steppe under deep snow. We're now in the Buryat Republic, Russia's Buddhist heartland. From the train window you'll see Buddhist datsan (temples) on hillsides , golden rooftops above white. Ulan-Ude, the Buryat capital, has the world's largest Lenin head statue, frosted at the temples. The train passes through but doesn't stop long. The light changes here. The sky gets bigger. The earth gets flatter and whiter. The sense of crossing a continent becomes physical.

The deep interior of Russia's Far East. Hours pass. The taiga continues , denser here, darker, the kind of forest that makes you understand why Siberia became where Russia sent its exiles. In February the trees carry kilos of snow on every branch , the famous "winter taiga" postcard. The Amur region begins. The Amur River is one of Asia's great rivers , it forms the natural boundary between Russia and China, frozen solid in February. Watch for it from the train windows as we approach. Occasionally the train passes through small towns , wooden houses pumping woodsmoke, felt boots, satellite dishes, snowmobiles parked outside every door (this is winter, the only way through). These towns exist because of the railway. Without the Trans-Siberian, they'd be unreachable for months of the year.

The train makes a stop at Khabarovsk , a major city on the Amur River, right on the Chinese border. Depending on the stop length, you can walk the platform, buy provisions from the station vendors, or grab 20 minutes of fresh air. Khabarovsk sits at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri rivers. From the station platform you can see the river. The Amur tiger (the world's largest cat) ranges in forests east of here. The final stretch to Vladivostok. The forest thins. Hills rise. The Pacific is close. After 6 days and 8,600 km from Moscow, the ocean is almost visible.

Vladivostok. Train 001 arrives. We step off the Rossiya at the terminus , 9,288 km from Moscow Yaroslavsky, six days after boarding. Vladivostok in February is sharp , clear blue skies, sea-ice forming in the bays, the city dusted in white but warmer than Yakutsk (around −10°C, Pacific-moderated). Golden Horn Bay: a deep-water harbour shaped like Constantinople's Golden Horn, surrounded by hills and warships. This is Russia's Pacific Fleet base, and the military presence is everywhere , submarines, destroyers, history. The Russky Island Bridge , one of the world's longest cable-stayed bridges (3.1 km span), connecting the city to Russky Island. Walk or drive across for views over the bay. Fresh Pacific seafood at its winter peak: king crab in season, scallops, sea urchin, far east oysters , this is where you eat Russia's best seafood. Indoor cafes, vodka, and a Korean-Russian-Chinese culinary mash-up that exists nowhere else. The city has energy that Moscow doesn't , frontier energy, Pacific-facing, young, and surprisingly cosmopolitan.

Morning flight from Vladivostok (VVO) to Yakutsk (YKS) , S7 Airlines, approximately 3.5 hours. We cross the entire Russian Far East from Pacific coast to the Lena River basin. Yakutsk: the world's coldest city, the world's largest city built entirely on permafrost. Population 350,000. In February you arrive into the legendary cold , −40°C is a normal afternoon, −50°C is not unusual on a still night. Eyelashes freeze in seconds. Spit crystallises before it hits the ground. Hot tea thrown into the air turns to a cloud of ice crystals (you'll do this, on camera). Cars are left running for hours because the engines won't restart if they're switched off. The fog of frozen exhaust hangs over every street. Buildings are on stilts driven deep into the permafrost so the heat from inside doesn't melt the ground beneath. The Permafrost Institute Museum shows you what permafrost looks like , cores of ice and soil going back 3 million years. The Mammoth Museum has real mammoth tusks, bones, and frozen specimens found in the surrounding permafrost. Siberia is the world's greatest mammoth archive. Layered up, you'll be fine; the city has built a culture around moving comfortably through cold most of humanity will never experience.

The permafrost kingdom: an underground ice cave tour. You descend into frozen ground and walk through chambers where the ice walls are millions of years old. The temperature is −10°C year-round , which means walking out of the cave into Yakutsk's −40°C is the only place on Earth a permafrost cave actually feels warm. Ice sculptures, frozen mammoths, ancient mud , this is time in solid form. Afternoon: Lena Pillars Nature Park , a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Columns of Cambrian limestone rising 100–200 metres directly above the Lena River. The formations took 400 million years to erode into their current shapes. In February the Lena River itself is the road , a 4,400 km ice highway you can drive on. We approach the Pillars across the frozen river by UAZ van; the angle from below the cliffs in winter light, with the river white and silent under your wheels, is the photograph people travel to Yakutia for. Evening: traditional Sakha cuisine , the indigenous culture of the Yakut people. Try stroganina (thin-shaved frozen raw fish, an ice-cold delicacy that makes complete sense at −40°C), horse meat tartare, fermented mare's milk (kumiss), and black bread. The Sakha have survived here for centuries; their food is built for survival in extreme cold, and February is the month it makes the most sense.

Final morning in Yakutsk. If there's time before your flight, the Lena River embankment at sunrise (around 8:30am in February, the sun crawling sideways across the horizon). The river is 4,400 km long , it drains an area nearly the size of India. In February it lies under a metre of ice, white and silent, the surface scored with vehicle tracks. Flights from Yakutsk route through Moscow (SVO) or connect onward. Fly out YKS with the knowledge that you've crossed 12,000+ km of Russia from St. Petersburg to Siberia's most remote city, in the season most travellers are too scared to attempt. End of journey.