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 🥳
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 🥳
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 🌫️
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 🤶🏼
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 🏷️
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 💵
There were the restaurant streets all over the place 🥣
And markets for everything 🌺
And Little India looked very colorful. Especially at night 🏮
And the towers were the most illuminated 🌆
One day, we went to the Batu Caves 🏯
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 🏮
And …
… crazy figures, …
… mosaics, …
… dragons, …
… and some love ♥️
Of course we went to a bar as well and had a great night with a funny local band 🎸

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 🏙️
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 🚀

Sitting our new pet friends, city life and winter hiking in Almaty, Kazakhstan (November 2025)

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 🚀