A 38-year-old woman drove thousands of kilometres to reach the coldest inhabited place on earth — the village of Oymyakon in Russia’s Siberia.

Nidhi Tiwari wanted to break the notion that only “men are fit for long challenging drives”, she said while speaking to Metro in the city on Friday.

The mother of two teenagers was in town as part of the second edition of Mahindra Xtreme U — an off-roading event for women over the weekend — on the occasion of International Women’s Day.

The company has created an off-road course near the Eco Urban Village in New Town.

The first day of the event on Saturday saw 100-odd participants getting off-roading tips from Tiwari.

Tiwari, who hails from Delhi, said she took a flight to Moscow and then another to land at Yakutsk airport in Northeast Russia in the winter of 2016.

She sat at the wheel of a modified Toyota Landcruiser Prado 4X4 and drove to Oymyakon. It is a place where vehicles are kept running 24 hours lest the batteries die and the fuel freezes because of the extreme cold, she said.

The coldest temperature in Oymyakon to date is -71.2 degrees Celsius in the 1920s.

Tiwari said the coldest temperature she endured during her trip was -59.2 degrees Celsius. “Had I switched off the ignition even for 30 seconds, I would have been left stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

The frozen roads and only three hours of daylight in winter made driving “very challenging”, Tiwari said.

“I had to mostly drive in extremely lowlight. I was worried I would run out of fuel because the engine could not be stopped at any point of time.

“Driving on frozen roads was a challenge... I had to be also careful not to veer towards the edges to prevent the wheels from getting stuck in the soft snow.”

Tiwari said apart from the road and extreme cold her main challenge was food. “Their delicacies include stroganina, which is raw, long-sliced frozen fish, variations of reindeer meat, frozen horse liver, and ice cubes of horse blood teamed with macaroni. I tried everything but soon shifted to just bread and jam.”

The landscape was the biggest pull, though, and the memories will last a lifetime, she said. “I still can’t get over the way the landscape changed colour throughout the day. The play of light was unbelievably beautiful. Photographs cannot do justice.”