Category: nature

Hikes and special rock climbing with friends in Kyrgyzstan and Io (August, September 2025)

From the Issyk Kul, we went into the mountains and found the next nice camp spot.
One day, a local came by with his horse and I tried it 🤠
The next local came with his motorbike, and I tried that as well 😁
The ordinary way to treat the trash: smaller or bigger holes that get filled up and closed when full. Sometimes extending the capacity by burning the trash 🔥
We met again with Merel and Leon and had a great time at a very small lake in the mountains ⛺
The view on a hike, we did together, was wonderful. Here is our tour on Komoot ⛰️
After a couple of days at the small lake, we split up and Racki and I went for a two day hike to another lake higher in the mountains 🚀
The hike was pretty exhausting for me and I felt kind of tensed but in the end our destination was very beautiful ❤️
We slept one night in our tiny one person tent. All alone at that beautiful spot 🥳
The next day, in the sun, the lake was even more beautiful ☀️
And we went back to Rosinante. Here are our tours on Komoot: to the lake, back to Rosinante 🚀
And in the next few days we made it to the climbing area south of Bishkek, where we have been some months ago 🎊
We met again with Merel and Leon and climbing together was awesome! And this time very special: Merel and Leon had both no experience with rock climbing. For Leon, who did a lot of free climbing while mountaineering, the rock climbing (even in his hiking boots) felt natural from the get go. No fear and very intuitive and free body movements.
Merel got frightened a lot in the beginning but she lived through all the moments of fear, pressure, stress, and panic attacks. It was awesome to see someone experiencing all this and being happy to do so. We helped here by joining her on the wall etc. but she did the crazy emotional work.
It was so impressive to see her process and experience that Racki and I often thought back to when climbing. This experience gave me a lot.
From then on, I’m often thinking back to these days when facing a route or move that seems impossible to me. Refreshing these memories often helps me to geniue believe that everything might be possible, that I can just try regardless of doubts and fears! Thanks Merel.
That was us on a nice and very funny movie night in the camper of our friends 📽️
After days of climbing, we went to Almaty (Kazakhstan).
Our first mission was to extend the customs document for Rosinante because when we entered the customs union of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, the customs officer gave us just about two months. I thought that it would be easy to extend it at the border crossing between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, but it was not possible. The only option the border officers knew about was a border run to Uzbekistan which would have been a detour of about 1200km and two border crossings that potentially would have taken about twelve hours!
We researched but didn’t find any info about extending the document in Almaty. We asked friends in Almaty and one said that there might be a possibility. So we went to Almaty and the next day we happily managed to start the extension process in a Kazakh customs department. It took us only a couple of hours and a lot of  conversations via Google Translate, but we did it!
Rosinante was finally allowed to stay again for one year in the customs union 🥳
In Almaty we stayed mostly at the Atakent Mall. It’s a well known parking lot next to a small park 🅿️
We met old and new friends and had a look at their homes on wheels 😁
Some of them had lovely and sometimes pretty weird decorations.
And finally I bought a guitar. She was a portable headless guitar and because of her modern look, I named her Io. From there on I started practicing mostly every day. It was a rough start.
The finger positioning, the strumming, … It was so hard. But I’m still playing and I love it.

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 🤣

To Kyrgyzstan, again a broken bushing, and a lot of lakes, and a lot of car recoveries (July, August 2025)

We took a border to Kyrgyzstan that we had never taken before. It has been opened just a couple of weeks before for tourists. The officers were all friendly but at the passport control the officer did not understand that Deutschland means Germany 🙃
We tried to show him the Russian translation on our passport but he couldn’t read the small letters. Translating with Google Translate didn’t help as well. But apart from us, there was only one more man wanting to cross the border and this one man spoke German. After he ensured the border officer that we are from Germany, he was happy to let us pass 🥳
After crossing the border, I checked our new bushings in the front shock absorbers and discovered that one was broken again. After 2300 km. To be sure, we removed one front wheel and detached the shock absorber. With only one car jack it got quite tricky to put it in again but as experienced bush mechanics we did it 😁
Our plan was to take a small mountain pass to the Peak Lenin area but because we were not sure if the mountain pass was actually passable, and it would most likely would have been pretty offroady, and we  had this broken bushing, we changed our plan and tried to find a spare part in the next bigger town. We tried several car part shops and mechanics. They were nice and friendly, but we did not succeed. So we decided to drive to Osh (the second biggest city of Kyrgyzstan) 🤪
In between, we chilled a bit 🌞
And Racki managed to fix our phone holder 🥳
In Osh we parked at the Tess Hotel for free. It was a good city camp spot. And after some hours of trying, messaging, communicating and waiting for a couple of days, we got new bushings. Six Euro a piece. Doomed to die soon 🤯
In the night, it seemed like all the locals took a walk because it was much cooler than during the day. These little karts looked so funny 🤣
Right next to a typical UdSSR monument 😶
We decided to go back to Issyk Kul (the biggest lake in Kyrgyzstan, the fourth biggest mountain lake in the world) 😯
On the way there, we took a break at the Toktogul reservoir. We had been there a couple of times in the last year but now the locals had been building up some tourist stuff: yurt camp, umbrella rental, etc. 💸
They even had a prehistoric banana 🐉
But still we had a good time, helped two families to recover their cars after getting stucked, got some food gifted and finally helped to recover a local truck with the big off-road overlander truck of another German traveler couple. It was the first recovery of a truck for us and that made me even more happy to have a car instead of a truck… But the local truck driver was super relaxed and grateful. And I learned why there are quite many completely destroyed truck tyres on the sides of the roads: the truck drivers don’t have the tools to remove a flat one and so they keep going until it falls off on its own 👩‍🔧
At the Issyk Kul, we visited some sites we had not been before and took a swim in a super salty small lake. Perfect for non swimmers. It was not possible to sink in that one and it was very healthy 🪄
Another nice spot at the lake 🥳
Racki became a Macrame knitting machine and her creations got more and more beautiful ✨
There were some thunder storms and the mountains on two sides of the lake looked amazing 🎉
When I checked the new bushings and we investigated a noise Rosinante made only from now and then, we found oil leaking out of her engine 😯
In the end we found that the noise came from Rosinante’s bottom protection and the oil came out of the oil filter. We went to Karakol to have the filter changed and the mechanic needed almost an hour to remove the old one because the last mechanics had put it so strong on the engine 🤪