After a couple of days in Almaty, we went to Tamgaly Tas, our favorite rock climbing area in Central Asia. In the end, we stayed there about two months. Our friends Merely and Leon joined us for a week and we did a lot of climbing together  🚀

Leon was not able to find climbing shoes in his size. Size 46 is not so Common in Central Asia. After some routes in his hiking boots, we thought that maybe climbing barefoot is an option and so we tried it. And I have to say, it works a lot better than I would have thought. Leon did really well and climbed a 6c in top rope barefoot ✨

And Merel continued her climbing journey and developed natural movements and a mostly calm mind while climbing. Just minor panic attacks from time to time. The salt in the soup 😁

Before Leon and Merely continued their journey, we gifted them a sticker and we are looking forward to see them again 🤗

The weather was mostly very good. Only some days the wind got pretty nasty and a few times we had small sand storms 🌬️

We moved into our camp spot that we used the year before for so long. Home sweet home 🏡

And then we met again with Sarah, Maria, Luci, Wouter and Vedinger 🥳

We had a proper camp and such a nice climbing life. Everyday something was going on ⛺

And every evening, we had dinner together, hang around or played some cards and had a good time 🎉

One day, we helped locals to change their flat tyre. They only had that tiny car jack which was not capable of lifting their off road car. They wanted to gift us this tiny jack as reward for helping them 😄

We had a great time together and sometimes even did small operations 🙃

And of course we did a lot of climbing. Sarah and Wouter bought themselves their own shoes, harnesses and helmets and got all into climbing. They learned a whole lot. Sarah did her first leading routes and on one of the last climbing days, Racki and I did another 7a route. Wouter gifted me his almost new climbing shoes because they were too tight for him and we gifted them Rackis old rope 🎊

And Sarah took some nice photos of Racki playing with the puppy stray dogs 🐕

They were absolutely cute 🥰

And me learning to play my guitar called Io 🎸

It was a crazy difficult process but I managed more and to let it sound like a guitar 😁

I was very happy with this move. The beginning looks not that hard on the video, but for me it was the first time to build up the tension like that 🎉

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 👍