Minus 51°C. One tiny Volkswagen. No backup.
Most cars give up long before this. This one almost did too.
Zoef set off alone across Siberia in a Volkswagen Up, a city car never built for anything like this, aiming for Yakutsk: the coldest city on Earth. The goal sounded simple. Reach Yakutsk before the cold reaches him first.
It did not go smoothly.
The clutch turned to concrete. The gearbox oil froze solid. The tires literally went square overnight, so the car drove like it was rolling on bricks until they slowly rounded out again. At one point the temperature dropped so low the car’s own display could not even register it anymore, stuck at its -45°C limit while the real temperature outside was -50°C.
Along the way, Zoef fed what he thought was a stray dog on the roadside. It was a wolf.
He also debunks a myth you have probably seen in cold-weather thumbnails everywhere. Yakutsk is not always -64°C. That number is a record from a single day back in 1891. A brutal winter there usually sits closer to -37°C, with the occasional -50°C cold snap like the one Zoef drove straight into.
The most nerve-wracking stretch comes at the Lena River. No bridge exists there yet (one is under construction, expected by 2028), so the only way across in winter is driving straight over the frozen river itself, weaving between visible cracks in the ice, following tire trails because there is no real road.
Once he finally reaches Yakutsk, the story shifts. Locals take him in, rebuild his car for real Siberian winters with double-layered windows and insulated fuel lines, feed him sausage and frozen stroganina, and treat him with a level of hospitality he did not expect after all the warnings he’d heard back home.
Watch the full journey (clutch failures, wolf encounter, frozen river crossing and all):
