Tag: friends

A crazy off-road, play and music festival and a very turquoise lake in Kyrgyzstan (August 2025)

After some more days, we met again with our friends, who we got to know in Tajikistan, for the Travel Fest. The location was directly at the lake, the weather was perfect and there was a lot going on 🥳
Most of the visitors camped in the festival area in cars or tents and they did a lot of motor sport. First came the motocross and after that the quads 🎉
And then the jeeps 🚀
They had good strategies to cool their cars during the race 💦
And in the last race, the obstacles got ridiculous! Before the race we and all the visitors and racers investigated the jumps and the big pits. We were wondering how they would approach them in the race 🤔
Turned out that some would just go with full force 🚀
And took the hard landing 😶
Got stuck 🙃
And broke down on top of the other side. But after twenty minutes or so the car was running again 😄
In the process some got pushed into the pit by cars (at the top left of the photo) 🤣
And others winched themselves out pretty good and fast 🚀
Where as others stayed in the pit until the end of the race and had to get recovered 🐢
We played beach volleyball, were swimming in the lake and had a good time with our neighbors 🌞
Although the four of us were the only visitors from Europe/ western countries. During the day there were a lot of games going on and we had a lot of fries 😁
Every evening the music started and we had good parties 🎶
With a lot of dancing under the moon on the beach 💃🕺
And after three days the crazy off-road festival was over and we were very happy to have been there 🎊
After the festival we stayed a bit more at the lake and chilled with bonfires…
… and stick bread 😋
One day, the garbage truck which collected the trash from the festival got stuck on the sandy track near our camp spot. We tried to help them but with a truck like that it was pointless. The truck crew waited a long time, we gave them water and snacks but in the evening, they just left. I think the truck is still there 🙃
After the lake, Racki and I made use of the good weather and drove to the mountains of Karakol. At that point of the track, we turned around and took a camp spot nearby. As always it doesn’t look that wild in the photo but it was.  The rental and taxi Buchankas and old soviet jeeps were shaking like crazy going through there 😄
So we took the hike from our camp spot. On the way we came across very beautiful yurt camps 🎉
The hike was beautiful and very famous. We had never met as many hikers on a hike in central asia before 😁
The Ala Köl had a very nice color 🎉
And we had a good time hiking back to Rosinante and finishing this 27 km hike. See the whole tour in Komoot ⛰️
After the hike, we went back to the Issyk Kul to chill again 🌞
One day, we built ourselves a scale to check how many bags we would need to take our climbing equipment with us to Malaysia and Thailand from November to March 👍
See them fly 🚀
And push 🤣

Rock climbing in Kyrgyzstan and multi day hiking in Uzbekistan (April 2025)

From Almaty, we went to the nice rock climbing area south of Bishkek we had visited the year before as well. Have a look on the crag.
Our friend Maria joined us and brought a new friend with her who tried rock climbing for the first time.
Together we had a lot of fun hanging around, climbing …
… and partying on a techno party in a nice, old bunker location.
From Bishkek we went into the direction of Osh to cross the border to Uzbekistan to then continue to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan (again), Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
Sometimes the areas around rivers in the stan countries are irritating: for me rivers are mostly the nicest nature places but here often the rivers are used as trash dumps.
As always in Uzbekistan: the invasion of the Damas mini buses! They are everywhere.
Uzbekistan has an interesting car market which is dominated by Chevrolets produced in the country: have a look at more info on Reddit.
We went into the beautiful Uzbek mountains and started a two days hike.
The hike was beautiful with some river crossings and a bit of rock crawling.
Our destination was a beautiful waterfall.
And not far from the waterfall we found a nice camp spot for our tent.
The weather was super nice and it really felt like summer again!
The way back to Rosinante was mostly pathfinding in the labyrinth of goat trails.
Here are our tours on komoot: day one, day two.
We continued our way in the direction of Tajikistan.

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.