We went back to Almaty (Kazakhstan) to take care of the house and cat of friends while they were in Germany for their holidays. For us this was perfect to clean and maintain Rosinante’s camping cabin.

First of all we emptied the whole cabin and cleaned it a crazy lot. Some parts of the carpet we had to clean with bleach to remove moldy or strong dirt. I was not a big fan of bleach but in the end, when living for so long in a small cabin, it is like a magical cleaner.

Again, we had a look at everything we had and sorted everything in a keep, maybe and a give away pile.

And we washed almost everything we had.

After the cleaning, we bought Rosinante a nice anti-rust treatment for most of the metal parts of the frame, rear bumper, wheel suspension etc. This is her after cleaning .

And this with the new protection.

The guy who did it was a recommendation of the Startroopies (friends of ours) and we felt he did a good job for 400€.

After that we put everything back inside and it went very well. Letting go of some stuff absolutely helped. Especially because we wanted to keep the snowboards inside the driver’s cabin to protect them from the weather etc.

Our heating and air condition blower started to make disturbing noises and so we went to car city in Almaty to get a new one.

And the new and stronger coil springs for Rosinante’s rear suspension, which we had sent to a Kazakh friend, arrived and we mounted them by ourselves. And the handling of Rosinante, which never had been bad, improved a lot.

After cleaning Rosinante, I had my teeth cleaned.

And Racki got some Hannibal Lector treatment.

This was the crazy cat we were sitting. She was super cute and very, very much attached to humans. Every morning at around 4 o’clock she came in our bed and woke us up by lying down around or on our heads. And if we ignored this, she started biting our feet until we fed her and let her out of the house.

One advantage of a house: an oven for casserole and french fries. It was really nice to live in a house for these three weeks but living in Rosinante was always nicer.

The last day, we cleaned everything we used and when I was cleaning the shower bath, the holding for the shower gels fell off the wall and smashed the shower faucet. I got pretty pissed. Especially because I knew our friends would come back the next day and I imagined that it would not be so nice to come home with a kid and having no shower or bath. Because of the insurance, we did not try to repair it. In the end, we found a temporary solution in using a hose we were about to trash.

We did a very nice hike with Maria and her dog Vedinger.

The snow was pretty deep. Sometimes even waist deep and so we had to fight through it.

Vedinger had to fight as well but enjoyed it a lot.

And of course we went out with our friends.

One night we visited a “gay bar”. It was good fun.

And on one of our last nights in Almaty we had a proper farewell party.

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.