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.

We had the first cold nights and the days got colder as well in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Because it was too cold for rock climbing , we drove in the city and stayed most of the time at the parking lot of the Atakent Mall. Even now at the end of the travelers season, there were a lot of other campers 🌨️

Sarah and Wouter were there as well and together with the other campers we had a great party night with a lot of dancing 💃🕺

We went two times to an escape room in Almaty. From the website we were aware that these escape rooms would be more focused on horror than on puzzles but boy, we were surprised nevertheless! Before starting an escape room, we could choose a level of horror and physical contact. For the first room, we picked full contact, maximum level. Oh ha! The escape room was more of a hall with several rooms. It was dark and often pitch black. We did puzzles but the most impressive were the actors who were chasing us in horror outfits equipped with tasers and real chainsaws! The chainsaws were missing the sharp chains but still they did not miss their intention. The tasers were real tasers. I had burn marks for several days. The actors pushed us on the floor, dragged us around , and grabbed our legs when we were solving puzzles. And there were explosions, loud, disturbing horror noises! Although we needed some help with the descriptions in Russian, we had an crazy and exciting experience 🧟‍♂️

Racki saw a pet sitting request in one of the climbing groups for Almaty on telegram. The contact to the pet owners was super nice from the get go and after just a few messages with them everything was set. The woman was already out of town but her husband was still in Almaty. We met with him to get to know Sam (a big, powerful and lovely dog) and Furry (a very fluffy, beautiful and agile cat). The communication was a bit handicapped because Nikita could not speak English and we no Russian but Google Translate helped us out 🥰

Lovely brothers 🤗

Racki learned the Russian commands for Sam 🐕

And I put this cute automatic brain translator hat on Furry. It worked sometimes a bit 🤣

Furry loved taking a wall, climbing trees. A real climber 💪

Interesting sleeping posture for such a big dog 😅

Very furry 😁

I practiced playing guitar and we liked our apartment life with our two pet friends 🎸

After more then two years we had to say goodbye to our water kefir Isarne-Schlippky. We did our best, but the car life, especially in winter, suited it not very well ⚰️

We cleaned Rosinante and prepared her for the four month stay in Almaty without us 🧹

And we got Rosinante another rust treatment because the rust guy did not do a good job treating the parts of her frame where she touched the car lift 🙃

Sam was ill and had to get antibiotics. But not as pills but with an injection. It was not so easy because he had to get three injections! On the third day he really hated it and when he saw Racki putting on the plastic gloves and preparing the injections he got very sad. When trying to give him the injections, he snapped at us and we had trouble holding him. 35kg of a powerful dog can get pretty strong. And we felt the stress for him got a whole lot. So a friend of Sam came by and together we managed to continue the injections 🥳

The brothers were so funny. Especially when they were playing together 🥰

One day, we did a hike to the Big Almaty Lake. It was beautiful and Sam had a lot of fun playing in the snow ❄️

The lake was a famous attraction for locals and tourists but in the middle of the week there were only a few other hikers. Here is our track on Komoot 🚶🚶‍♀️🚶🏼‍♀️🐕‍🦺

We had an awesome barbeque with our friend Gleb and his girlfriend and mother 🎊

And then it was time to park Rosinante for the winter 👋

And start our trip to Malaysia and Thailand with backpacks, tent and climbing gear 🚀