Category: sightseeing

Living in a skyscraper, sightseeing and more in Kuala Lumpur (November 2025)

Racki’s brother came from Germany and joined us for two and a half weeks ðŸĨģ
Together we moved into a very nice apartment on the 18th floor of one of the many high buildings in Kuala Lumpur 🌆
Because of the off-season it was only 15₮ a night for two bedrooms, a kitchen, and we had free access to a pool and the rooftop which had an awesome view ðŸĨģ
The skyscrapers, and of course especially the Petronas Towers and the Maybank Tower, were beautiful in the night as well. And sometimes the reflections looked astonishing 🊞
We were mostly taking the buses and trains and mostly they were not overcrowded. Only once we had to wait in a queue. And that queue was pretty British: perfect line, no pushing 😀
Even though it was the rainy season, we had not too much rain. But sometimes the clouds were swallowing the towers ðŸŒŦïļ
We did a lot of sight seeing and showed Tom (Racki’s brother) the biggest mall we have ever seen: the Pavillon. This thing was crazy! The shops had house numbers. There was an app just to find your way and they had the craziest Christmas decorations ðŸĪķ🏞
Instead of the typical German Kaufmannsladen, there were miniature versions of street shops and …
… street kitchens 😁
And interesting services like this ear cleaning service. They had a couple of treatment chairs and above every chair there was a monitor showing live what got removed from the ear of the patient 👂🏞
I liked the graffiti street a lot. Two or three streets with big paintings in the walls and …
… the streets 🎊
There we went to one of my favorite restaurants and paid only 3,5₮ for two dishes and a coke which was very cheap, even for Kuala Lumpur prices 🏷ïļ
The contrast between the old and mouldy buildings and the new shiny one was very interesting.
One of the locals (a taxi driver) told us, he paid about 40.000₮ for an apartment in one of the older two story houses and was paying it off for 30 years ðŸ’ĩ
There were the restaurant streets all over the place ðŸĨĢ
And markets for everything 🌚
And Little India looked very colorful. Especially at night ðŸŪ
And the towers were the most illuminated 🌆
One day, we went to the Batu Caves ðŸŊ
And met a lot of monkeys hanging around, stealing food 😄
The temples were beautiful and colorful 🎊
Some 372 steps up to the main cave 🚀
We got some blessings …
… and walked through …
… this magnificent cave 😍
The other day we went to another colorful temple 🎊
This one had the most lanterns ðŸŪ
And …
… crazy figures, …
… mosaics, …
… dragons, …
… and some love â™Ĩïļ
Of course we went to a bar as well and had a great night with a funny local band ðŸŽļ

A different world: Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia (November 2025)

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 🏙ïļ
But instead of jungle Kuala Lumpur had these very impressive towers 🌆
Beautiful in their own way ðŸĨģ
Some even blended a bit into nature which was not so easy in that concrete city ðŸŒą
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 ðŸŽĻ
And the bars of China Town were we moved into our first hostel ðŸŪ
This one reminded us of Uzbekistan with all the small Damas Deluxe micro vans 😁
Proper asian street restaurants ðŸĨģ
Sticky rice with mango and coconut sauce ðŸĨ°
And proper ice cream ðŸĻ
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 ðŸĨģ
We met one of these awesome robots of which I had seen so many videos on YouTube before ðŸĪ–
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 ðŸĨģ
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 🚀

To Kyrgyzstan, again a broken bushing, and a lot of lakes, and a lot of car recoveries (July, August 2025)

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 ðŸĨģ
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) ðŸĪŠ
In between, we chilled a bit 🌞
And Racki managed to fix our phone holder ðŸĨģ
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 ðŸĪŊ
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 ðŸĪĢ
Right next to a typical UdSSR monument ðŸ˜ķ
We decided to go back to Issyk Kul (the biggest lake in Kyrgyzstan, the fourth biggest mountain lake in the world) ðŸ˜Ŋ
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. ðŸ’ļ
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 ðŸ‘Đ‍🔧
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 ðŸĨģ
Racki became a Macrame knitting machine and her creations got more and more beautiful âœĻ
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 ðŸ˜Ŋ
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 ðŸĪŠ