Four weeks ago I thought I was going to die from hypothermia. I was enclosed in a shield of air so maliciously icy, I could barely summon the strength to breathe. In any case, it hurt to suck oxygen into my lungs. The air was so Arctic it burned and stung. So unfathomably cold was it, my faith in a loving and hospitable world was severely shaken.
It was colder than the time I trekked across pack-ice in Antarctica, its fissures creaking and expanding off into the frozen yonder; colder, come to think of it, than the brief swim I had afterwards in that continent's polar waters. Then, at least, I could extricate myself from the deep blue freeze and quell the pain with a warm blanket and a cup of hot, rum-spiked tea.
It was colder than the time I trekked up Perito Merino Glacier in Argentina's Southern Patagonian Ice Field, its jagged snout coming off in chunks and crashing into the frigid water, its icy furrows so thoroughly depleted of oxygen they had turned to suffocated shades of blue.
It was colder than the day I drove along the ice-paved Icefields Parkway from Banff to Lake Louise in Canada's Alberta and discovered that the ski slopes there had been closed because gales were blowing and snow was falling and the temperature, when wind-chill was factored in, was just shy of minus 40 degrees Celsius. My nose, poking above a tube scarf, felt frostbitten for hours afterwards.
It wasn't quite as cold, though, as America's Midwest, where temperatures approached record lows last week and people died from hypothermia. But still, Ulan-Ude was a mind-numbing minus 36 Celsius, and not even as cold as it is wont to get here. My body was snap-frozen.
We had arrived in the capital of Russia's Autonomous Republic of Buryatia, located near the eastern shore of Lake Baikal, by train the day before, on our Trans-Siberian journey from Moscow to Vladivostok.
Until now we'd adapted well to the northern hemisphere's unfamiliar freeze: our hands were wrapped in polar gloves; our heads crowned in protective wool; our bodies clad in thermal layers and ice-proof jackets; our feet — the most important body part when enduring such extremes — sheltered in snug snow boots. The cold was nothing, we declared, when insulated so thoroughly against its malice.
"In some sense I was slipping into the shoes of these Russian Orthodox Christians, who were