Wonderful hikes, ski tours, presents, Christmas, new year’s eve, and visa disaster (December 2024, January 2025)

We went to the Ala Archa National Park south of Bishkek to do some mountaineering.
Our weather app (meteoblue, it’s the best one) was quite sure that it wouldn’t get colder than -15 but it got -25 degrees Celsius in the night. That was the coldest we had witnessed in Rosinante so far and Racki and I both agreed that it was our limit. The heater was running non stop on full power, we had to put all our additional thermal stuff like blankets in front of the rear hatch and the alcove and still it wouldn’t get warmer than 16 degrees inside. In the morning I started Rosinante to charge our living battery and after a long pre heating she started up without any problems.
I had not much sleep because I was worried that our heater would stop working again but in the morning we started an extraordinary tour!
Beautiful mountains.
In every direction.
This is one of my favorite photos of all time.
We went up to the summit Komsomolets on 4204 meters and the view was crazy.
Here is our tour on Komoot with more photos etc.https://www.komoot.com/tour/1982168557?ref=atd
Back in Bishkek, we met a super nice Kyrgyz couple and their friend for dinner. We had first met them at the Issyk Kul and they had invited us to visit them. It was a very nice and interesting evening with plenty of food and a lot of stories.
It was Racki’s birthday, we went to an awesome Indian restaurant and I gifted her a self designed shirt.
After the city, we found a very nice camp spot up the mountain near the biggest ski resort around Bishkek and one of the biggest in the whole country.
While waiting for more snow, we had fun with our slides.
And then we had our first snowboard day! The pistes of the ski area were not well prepared and not so steep but still it was fun to ride again.
After the snowboard day, we wanted to go back to Almaty (in Kazakhstan) to spend Christmas with our friends there. But at the border the officers told us that we weren’t allowed to leave Kyrgyzstan because we over did our visa days!
It turned out that the calculation of the visa days worked differently than what we did. As Germans we are allowed to stay 60 days in a period of 120 days without a visa. We thought that after one period of 120 days finished, a new one would start and that we would be allowed to stay another 60 days. But it was different. Every time you cross the border the officers check how many days of the last 120 you stayed on Kyrgyzstan. If these are more than 60, you over did your visa days.
We could not pay a fee at the border but had to go back to Bishkek to get a police report and apply for a leave visa. That would take at least a week and we would not be able to celebrate Christmas with our friends. Racki and I were sad. Racki was more sad and I got frustrated again.
To get the report from the police we had to go to a police station. The officers were all very friendly but still it was just shit. And expensive. We had to pay at a payment terminal in a supermarket and it took us an hour to figure out how we should do it. Some Kyrgyz people tried to help us but couldn’t do it as well. In the end a police officer came along and showed us what to do.
Applying for the leave visa was pretty easy and quickly done online. But it was expensive as well. In the end this visa fuck up cost each of us about 180 Euros. A lot of money for us with the life we were living. For me it was about one fifth of the money I needed for a whole month. For Racki it was even more.
When we went to Bishkek a couple of weeks ago, I preordered a new laptop in a small gaming laptop shop. I was thinking if it would all work out. “German thoughts”… The guys there were super friendly and the price was better than in Germany. And for the preorder I got an discount. At the day after we had our visa disaster, they messaged me that I could pick up my new laptop. If we would have crossed the border as we had planned, we would have to ship the laptop to Almaty, so it was easier to pick it up. But I still would have preferred to spend Christmas with our friends.
After a period of feeling not good about life and the universe etc. I managed to get more positive again, to live with what was coming. On Christmas we went to the first Christmas Market in Bishkek. It was sponsored by Coca Cola and a bit different than the ones in Germany but still we enjoyed it a lot.
We got our leave visa and spent a wonderful New Year’s eve with our friends in Almaty.
And had a nice party in a small bar club as well!
The next days we spent doing some maintenance and improvements on Rosinante. We were sure that the brake pads of rear brake needed to be changed, but they did not. Another 120 Euros for basically nothing.
We improved the cables leading from the starter battery to our charging booster and did super good. Now with a sense line and bigger cables charging our 220 Ah Lithium battery was much better.
One day, we took the dog of friends for a nice walk on the snowy mountains.
And we had fun spending time doing city stuff with our friends.
But our plans to stay in Almaty for longer changed when we found out that the method to calculate the visa days was the same as in Kyrgyzstan. We had to leave on January 10th.

Winter came, our heater didn’t like it, and we managed to let go of some heavy weights (November, December 2024)

Winter was coming and with it came the first snow. So we left the Tamgaly Tas climbing area and moved to the city of Almaty.
After months of climbing, we started the city life and went to a regulars’ table of German immigrants (no photo) in a Paulaner restaurant and drank a lot of wheat beer.
Had a bonfire with friends.
And made new animal friends.
Did some hiking with our good friend Maria and her Kund (“Kind” (which means child) + “Hund” (which means dog) in the early winter weather.
After some days, we went back to Kyrgyzstan where we did a lot of beautiful winter hikes.
The weather was cold but beautiful!
And sometimes pretty white.
Our diesel heater stopped working from time to time and that really pissed me off. I guess in about three years of living in a car, I learned a lot. How to do things and how to deal with things. But still a not working diesel heater when temperatures went down to about -10 degrees Celsius was not easy to cope with. At some point I talked to Racki if it made still sense to live in Rosinante in winter. My mood went down a lot.
We cleaned the heater, which is necessary from time to time, but it didn’t help.
Still I had to crouch under the car mostly every morning and sometimes during the day to somehow get the fuel line working again. It was not nice to handle the metal clamps of the fuel line with these temperatures, rearranging the fuel line because that somehow helped get the heater running again. And then doing the same the next day because it did not help for a long time.
We thought about staying in a hostel but did not want to spend the money. We tried a lot to optimize everything.
At some point we took a big water bottle, filled it up from Rosinante’s auxiliary tank and had the heater suck the diesel from that bottle. This somehow worked better than having it pumping the diesel from Rosinante’s main tank.
The diesel seemed to be liquid and in a good condition but still in the end, the final solution was pretty easy and obvious: the diesel got too viscous in the cold.
After we put some anti gel additive in the tank, the heater was working very reliably.
I felt much better once we had solved that issue after two weeks of unrewarding trying and failing but still I felt very exhausted and stressed. It was a hard time for Racki and me because I did not feel much like talking a lot and felt kind of depressed.
It felt like there was always a heavy weight on me and us.
But we never fought or accused each other and so we managed to let go of the weight.
In a shop for handmade stuff we bought an original Kyrgyz carpet for a friend and I found this little fellow: Boris.
The glint wine season started.
In Karakul we had the service on our snowboards done to have them ready for ski touring once there would be enough snow. Our transportation method for our snowboards turned out to be pretty stupid. Back in Gudauri, we had put them into a strong plastic bag and had put them on Rosinante’s roof. The result of the weather, changing temperatures and humidity caused a lot of rust on the edges of them. But the friendly guys from a ski service did their best and a very good job.
We bought some slides in a supermarket and had a lot of fun sliding down the slopes.
We managed to find a fast and satisfying routine for living in the cold temperatures in Rosinante and it felt better and everything started to feel more easy for me again.
Drying of washed clothes still worked.
On our winter hikes there was a lot to see.
And we had wonderful views around the Issyk Kul. One of the biggest lakes in the world.
On the way to Bishkek, we found these.
And because most of our hiking trail was covered with ice, we tried to slide down the trail while sitting on stones. I did not work that much.

Three months of climbing paradise with friends in Kazakhstan: Tamgaly-Tas (September to November 2024)

We made it back to the climbing area we had visited months ago. This time the weather was perfect. Last time it was way too hot. The entrance fee was still beer and cola.
We did a whole lot of climbing.
And learned a lot, lot, lot.
Sarah and Wouter, the “Star Troopies” (travelers we had met before several times in different countries) joined us and tried rock climbing for the first time.
It was super awesome and they did super good. Although they had no own climbing shoes. Racki’s shoes were good for Sarah, but Wouter suffered a lot in my way to small shoes.
Climbing on the wall.
Climbing on another wall.
Climbing on an overhanging wall.
We had a whole lot of fun climbing,
hanging around,
and relaxing.
Slowly, slowly it was becoming Autumn.
Simon visited us and although he was afraid of heights, he made his first rock climbing experience as well.
Maria, who we had met before in Murghab on the Pamir and at the border from Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan, and her “half-human-half-dog dog” Vedi and another friend came as well and together we had a great time.
At one weekend there was a big climbing festival organized by the biggest “climbing company” Skala in the climbing area. Unfortunately the weather on that weekend was not very good. But nevertheless a whole lot of climbers joined the festival.
One day Kali and Didi, travelers from the Netherlands, came to the climbing area and we climbed a lot together, shared stories and experiences.
Didi brought trad (traditional climbing) gear and let me try it. It was my first time using that stuff and it was very interesting. In the sport/ rock climbing the bolts in the wall where you attach your robe are already set. In trad climbing you have to set these points by your own. To do so, you carry a lot of fancy and expensive gear around.
And we had water melon with the cheapest vodka we could find. It tasted like it had back when I was sixteen.
Sarah and Wouter came back and this time Wouter brought his own, brand new climbing shoes! It’s always nice to see if people love the rock climbing.
Again we had a great time at and in front of the rock.
Halloween!
Our last days of climbing on one of the last warm and sunny days of the year.
After the weather got too cold, we drove to Almaty and met a whole lot of our new friends we had met in the last couple of months.