After preparing Rosinante, getting our Russian transit visa, and choosing an agency for our stays in China, and all the activities in Almaty and Tamgaly Tas, it was time to continue our journey.

Our plan was: nine days of transit through Russia (with lots of climbing) to Mongolia, two months in Mongolia (mostly driving bad roads), two month China (climbing and sightseeing), three months in Laos and Cambodia (climbing and sightseeing), two more months in China (climbing, snowboarding and sightseeing) in which we would drive back to Kazakhstan.

Just a few days before leaving, another overlander with a Hilux and I had a look under the hood of Rosinante. He noticed a leak at our intercooler. And when I checked the cooling liquid, the level was pretty low, but not too low. I did never see it like that when Rosinante was cold. I didn’t panic, but it didn’t feel so good because we were about to leave and continue driving a lot.

So I cleaned the area around the leak, put a marker to see if Rosinante was loosing cooling liquid. We bought a big bottle of compatible cooling liquid to be able to refill more than our spare bottle could handle, if it would be necessary.

On our way out of Almaty, we went to a mechanic who we got recommended by Kasia and Michael. That mechanic was supposed to help us getting a technical certificate for Rosinante which confirms that she is running well etc. It was a mandatory document for the Chinese car documents…

We had the document already prepared and had arranged everything with the mechanic via WhatsApp. When we reached the garage, I thought our friends were kidding. We already have seen a lot but this garage looked just like a scrapyard. A lot of garages we got to know on our travels looked like a scrapyard, but this one just looked absolutely fucked. After searching for some minutes, we found one guy sleeping in a container who did not understand us and couldn’t deal with Google Translate. After searching some more, we found the mechanic. And we found the actual garage behind all the scrap, mud, wreckages. The mechanic guy was very friendly and gave us a tour. And it turned out that this garage was one of the most elaborated we’ve seen in the stan countries so far.

They had all kind of high level machines, were 3d measuring cars and parts, had laser cutters for metal constructions and were doing all kind of things.

And after giving us his stamp on our document for the China trip, I showed him the leak in Rosinante’s cooler and he just said that he was absolutely sure that there was no liquid flowing through that part of the cooler. The moisty stuff that had accumulated around the “leak” was most likely just some water that got under the hood, mixed itself with dirt and some oily liquid.

For me, this was another example for what is just happening a lot while overlanding: you think you know something and it turns out to be different. Somebody else thinks he knows something and it turns out to be different. And even after all this years of traveling and all the assumptions that turn out to be wrong, I still get trapped by them.

We continued our travels, but wait, what were these boards next to the highway in Kazakhstan about? Recycling? …

… No littering?! Were we still in Kazakhstan? Normally, here the only one caring about stuff like that was the wind. …

Safety? This couldn’t be Kazakhstan!

But it was. And we found our first real overlanding camp spot on our way to the north east of Kazakhstan. It was awesome!

The overlanding travels had us back and we were driving a lot to make it to the north east of Kazakhstan.

Eventually we arrived at the Lake Marakol. But it was very different than what we knew from the stan countries: we were not allowed to drive to the shore of the lake because of the breeding season and there were hardly any nice camp spots away from the shore. But in the end, we found a nice place.

It was a beautiful lake for sure.

But having a really nice view was only possible to hike and fight our way through a lot of bushes. See our hike on komoot.

We liked it: back in the stans, hiking, nature… beautiful. But I personally would not recommend Marakol Lake. There are so many lakes that are more beautiful, easier to reach, with a lot of camp spots.

From the lake, we went into the steppe and found this place!

Astonishing!

Such nice formations!

And the colors!

We loved the all the details.

And parked right next to the rocks.

And the sunsets were so beautiful as well!

And there were stars all over the sky!

We continued …

… to more rocks in the steppe.

Nice colors.

Next to the big Lake Zaysan.

Unfortunately thousands of grass hoppers lost their lives in Rosinante’s wheels.

Another beautiful camp spot with a very good internet connection for Racki to work online.

And this was our last camp spot before entering Russia. It was beautiful and close to the border.

And of course I was practicing playing the guitar almost every day.

We made it back to Kazakhstan and of course our first stop was at Gleb’s place to meet our friend and reunite with Rosinante and our plants Georgia and Pizza. Especially Georgia grew a lot with the help of Gleb’s mother.

And for that, she had earned the colorful magnet we got for her in Malaysia, which fit very well into her collection, even more.

After that, we met Arni at his new, big, and nice home.

The house was very nice and some walls were made the Kazakh way: absolute perfection.

We lived in his big yard and started preparing Rosinante for continuing our car life.

First, we had Rosinante’s bushings in the lower suspension arms in the front changed again: cheap, crappy Kyrgyz bushings out, new expensive German bushings in. Because the bushings were pressed, we couldn’t do it on our own in a proper way.

Some teeth cleaning for us and for Racki hours of drilling: all new and shiny.

And we went collecting shirts that we had designed for our birthdays. Racki got “Climber’s Life” in the style of the Stranger Things logo and I got “From another point of view” inspired by the nice arts cafe which we had visited in Malaysia.

We went to the famous Atakent Mall parking lot where a lot of foreign campers meet during the season. But this time we were alone. At least until during the night a German couple (Kasia and Michael) crawled to the parking lot with their car, having serious problems with it. Kasia even had to push the car for the last few meters.

The next day, it turned out that they had crawled all the way back to Kazakhstan from China because nobody there could help them. We connected them with Arni, who had a quite similar car. It turned out that he could indeed help them a lot. Not fixing everything, but enabling them to drive properly again to start sorting out things.

And even more interesting for us, they told us that it was now possible to drive through China on your own, only doing the border crossings in a group. And even the price got a lot cheaper than what we had heard about.

Our idea at that point was going back west to Georgia or Turkey, but now a new seed had been planted.

My birthday with good friends at a nice pizza place and awesome presents.

As always in spring, there was Nauryz in Kazakhstan.

It was nice as always: people got active after the winter. A nice feeling of spring.

We met again with Maria, our good friend, and had a good time at the festival …

… and in the bars of Almaty.

At Arni’s place, we did a lot of stuff for Rosinante. And we had a lot of fun doing so because Arni had a lot of ideas and was always motivated to try new stuff. Combined with his 3D printer, we made a lot of things possible.

Fixing our light in Arni’s workshop.

Getting a present for fixes on the way.

After some days, Harry, a friend of Arni, came to visit him and he helped us as well. Here they are fixing the hinge of our cabin hatch.

Unfortunately, my phone had a severe accident and was almost completely unusable. So the search for a repair shop or a new phone started… Not easy because everything is cheaper in Germany …

Months ago, one of Rosinante’s rear shock absorbers had started leaking. These shock absorbers were special ones from a German manufacturer called Toyota Nestle, and when I emailed them, they told us that two new absorbers would be almost 1400 Euros! Plus shipping and customs to get them to Almaty, of course.

The previous owner had bought these absorbers and I was never really happy with them, so we finally decided in Malaysia to order new shock absorbers and leaf springs for Rosinante from an Ironman shop in Almaty. Even after all these months, the biggest available shock absorbers didn’t make their way to the shop, so we decided to take one size smaller.

We ordered some static lifts to Arni’s place and together we did a good job swapping the shock absorbers and leaf springs.

We installed an additional intake for our diesel heater and a switch so that we could switch between heating up the air from outside or inside or both.

We rearranged the button to switch the charging of our living battery with Rosinante’s alternator.

And Arni made us a very special and beautiful new emblem for Rosinante!

Lovely and unique. 3D scanned, modeled, and made with love.

One evening, we met Gleb, his girlfriend, and his mother together with Maria to thank them again for taking care of our cars when we weren’t in Kazakhstan.

Like every year, Racki and I attended the Wings for Life run. We decided to join a bigger event in a small stadium in Almaty because of the rain.

And again we were not alone: Arni, another traveler (not in the photo), and our friend Abubakar in Tajikistan (running in Tajikistan) joined us. Together we did our best! Racki and I did almost 12 km each.

At Arni’s place, we did several barbecues. Our good friends Merel and Leon came back to Almaty as well, and Kasia and Michael joined us too. Together we had a nice evening with Merel performing her new songs and everybody singing some karaoke.

Paola and Igel, whom we got to know last year in Almaty, visited Arni’s home as well. They had to sort out some topics with their unique camper truck called Big Blue and were funny and easygoing as always.

Another evening, we went to an electro music party. Normally, I like parties like this, but the circumstances were… odd. Racki, Merel, and Leon went for a short evening walk in the park at the Atakent Mall parking lot and I went into Rosinante to make some music. Just days ago, I had started to make music with my laptop (and Bitwig) again and really liked it a lot and was very happy to really take some time to get going and enjoy making music.

After a few minutes, Racki came into Rosinante with tickets for that electro party and I was quite irritated. But she was so happy to surprise me that I just had to go. So I went with them. But the timing was… unfortunate. Racki did not like that it took quite some time for me to get used to my new evening experience with hundreds of people at a concert instead of making music on my own and got irritated by that. So it was not the easiest party, but still I liked the surprise more and more as we did a lot of dancing.