We made it to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and Rosinante was safely parked. It was a whole different world than central asia. From the airplane everything looked green, full of jungle, but not the city 🏙️

But instead of jungle Kuala Lumpur had these very impressive towers 🌆

Beautiful in their own way 🥳

Some even blended a bit into nature which was not so easy in that concrete city 🌱

The roads and rails got built in multiple levels and we had to get used to finding our walking pathes through these labyrinths. It felt like KL was made for driving by car than by bicycle or even walking 🧭

But it was fun 😁

The culture was very different in so many ways. One example are stores with plenty of action, manga, and cute figures 😀

And of course the small markets were very vivid and colorful 🎊

As was the street art 🎨

And the bars of China Town were we moved into our first hostel 🏮

This one reminded us of Uzbekistan with all the small Damas Deluxe micro vans 😁

Proper asian street restaurants 🥳

Sticky rice with mango and coconut sauce 🥰

And proper ice cream 🍨

But we did not expect to find the Christmas craziness in Malaysia 🎁

One day, we went to a small art and science festival. It was very interesting. We painted and talked to the super friendly locals 🥳

We met one of these awesome robots of which I had seen so many videos on YouTube before 🤖

And we painted motorcycles which then got digitalized and were racing a digital race 🏁

It was a nice and fun experience 🎊

We knew that it would be the rainy season in the beginning of our stay in Malaysia, but still the rainfalls were impressive! And it was obvious that the city was used to it. We were joking that in ten minutes of these rains, all the rain of one year in the stan countries came down. But apart from the impressive rainfalls it was not that rainy. And on our third day, we went climbing near the Batu Caves 🥳

It was very different than in the stans! There were a lot of plants on top and sometimes in the routes. More insects. But very nice! The easy routes had very comfortable steps and handles. And the rock was very interesting. Especially the tufa: rock formations that formed from calcium carbonate. Sometimes it was even possible to climb on or through these tufa 🚀

We took a border to Kyrgyzstan that we had never taken before. It has been opened just a couple of weeks before for tourists. The officers were all friendly but at the passport control the officer did not understand that Deutschland means Germany 🙃 We tried to show him the Russian translation on our passport but he couldn’t read the small letters. Translating with Google Translate didn’t help as well. But apart from us, there was only one more man wanting to cross the border and this one man spoke German. After he ensured the border officer that we are from Germany, he was happy to let us pass 🥳 After crossing the border, I checked our new bushings in the front shock absorbers and discovered that one was broken again. After 2300 km. To be sure, we removed one front wheel and detached the shock absorber. With only one car jack it got quite tricky to put it in again but as experienced bush mechanics we did it 😁

Our plan was to take a small mountain pass to the Peak Lenin area but because we were not sure if the mountain pass was actually passable, and it would most likely would have been pretty offroady, and we  had this broken bushing, we changed our plan and tried to find a spare part in the next bigger town. We tried several car part shops and mechanics. They were nice and friendly, but we did not succeed. So we decided to drive to Osh (the second biggest city of Kyrgyzstan) 🤪

In between, we chilled a bit 🌞

And Racki managed to fix our phone holder 🥳

In Osh we parked at the Tess Hotel for free. It was a good city camp spot. And after some hours of trying, messaging, communicating and waiting for a couple of days, we got new bushings. Six Euro a piece. Doomed to die soon 🤯 In the night, it seemed like all the locals took a walk because it was much cooler than during the day. These little karts looked so funny 🤣

Right next to a typical UdSSR monument 😶

We decided to go back to Issyk Kul (the biggest lake in Kyrgyzstan, the fourth biggest mountain lake in the world) 😯 On the way there, we took a break at the Toktogul reservoir. We had been there a couple of times in the last year but now the locals had been building up some tourist stuff: yurt camp, umbrella rental, etc. 💸

They even had a prehistoric banana 🐉

But still we had a good time, helped two families to recover their cars after getting stucked, got some food gifted and finally helped to recover a local truck with the big off-road overlander truck of another German traveler couple. It was the first recovery of a truck for us and that made me even more happy to have a car instead of a truck… But the local truck driver was super relaxed and grateful. And I learned why there are quite many completely destroyed truck tyres on the sides of the roads: the truck drivers don’t have the tools to remove a flat one and so they keep going until it falls off on its own 👩‍🔧

At the Issyk Kul, we visited some sites we had not been before and took a swim in a super salty small lake. Perfect for non swimmers. It was not possible to sink in that one and it was very healthy 🪄

Another nice spot at the lake 🥳

Racki became a Macrame knitting machine and her creations got more and more beautiful ✨

There were some thunder storms and the mountains on two sides of the lake looked amazing 🎉

When I checked the new bushings and we investigated a noise Rosinante made only from now and then, we found oil leaking out of her engine 😯 In the end we found that the noise came from Rosinante’s bottom protection and the oil came out of the oil filter. We went to Karakol to have the filter changed and the mechanic needed almost an hour to remove the old one because the last mechanics had put it so strong on the engine 🤪