From Almaty, we went to the nice rock climbing area south of Bishkek we had visited the year before as well. Have a look on the crag.

Our friend Maria joined us and brought a new friend with her who tried rock climbing for the first time. Together we had a lot of fun hanging around, climbing …

… and partying on a techno party in a nice, old bunker location.

From Bishkek we went into the direction of Osh to cross the border to Uzbekistan to then continue to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan (again), Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Sometimes the areas around rivers in the stan countries are irritating: for me rivers are mostly the nicest nature places but here often the rivers are used as trash dumps.

As always in Uzbekistan: the invasion of the Damas mini buses! They are everywhere. Uzbekistan has an interesting car market which is dominated by Chevrolets produced in the country: have a look at more info on Reddit.

We went into the beautiful Uzbek mountains and started a two days hike.

The hike was beautiful with some river crossings and a bit of rock crawling.

Our destination was a beautiful waterfall.

And not far from the waterfall we found a nice camp spot for our tent.

The weather was super nice and it really felt like summer again!

The way back to Rosinante was mostly pathfinding in the labyrinth of goat trails. Here are our tours on komoot: day one, day two.

We continued our way in the direction of Tajikistan.

We went back to Almaty (Kazakhstan) to take care of the house and cat of friends while they were in Germany for their holidays. For us this was perfect to clean and maintain Rosinante’s camping cabin.

First of all we emptied the whole cabin and cleaned it a crazy lot. Some parts of the carpet we had to clean with bleach to remove moldy or strong dirt. I was not a big fan of bleach but in the end, when living for so long in a small cabin, it is like a magical cleaner.

Again, we had a look at everything we had and sorted everything in a keep, maybe and a give away pile.

And we washed almost everything we had.

After the cleaning, we bought Rosinante a nice anti-rust treatment for most of the metal parts of the frame, rear bumper, wheel suspension etc. This is her after cleaning .

And this with the new protection.

The guy who did it was a recommendation of the Startroopies (friends of ours) and we felt he did a good job for 400€.

After that we put everything back inside and it went very well. Letting go of some stuff absolutely helped. Especially because we wanted to keep the snowboards inside the driver’s cabin to protect them from the weather etc.

Our heating and air condition blower started to make disturbing noises and so we went to car city in Almaty to get a new one.

And the new and stronger coil springs for Rosinante’s rear suspension, which we had sent to a Kazakh friend, arrived and we mounted them by ourselves. And the handling of Rosinante, which never had been bad, improved a lot.

After cleaning Rosinante, I had my teeth cleaned.

And Racki got some Hannibal Lector treatment.

This was the crazy cat we were sitting. She was super cute and very, very much attached to humans. Every morning at around 4 o’clock she came in our bed and woke us up by lying down around or on our heads. And if we ignored this, she started biting our feet until we fed her and let her out of the house.

One advantage of a house: an oven for casserole and french fries. It was really nice to live in a house for these three weeks but living in Rosinante was always nicer.

The last day, we cleaned everything we used and when I was cleaning the shower bath, the holding for the shower gels fell off the wall and smashed the shower faucet. I got pretty pissed. Especially because I knew our friends would come back the next day and I imagined that it would not be so nice to come home with a kid and having no shower or bath. Because of the insurance, we did not try to repair it. In the end, we found a temporary solution in using a hose we were about to trash.

We did a very nice hike with Maria and her dog Vedinger.

The snow was pretty deep. Sometimes even waist deep and so we had to fight through it.

Vedinger had to fight as well but enjoyed it a lot.

And of course we went out with our friends.

One night we visited a “gay bar”. It was good fun.

And on one of our last nights in Almaty we had a proper farewell party.