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 🚀