Figure 8 On A Bike

We knew good weather was supposed to be in store for Saturday, and woke up that morning to find the skies clearer and sun brighter than any day so far. I strolled out into the sunroom to appreciate the full view of the mountains, when something a bit off in color against the cliffs and snow caught my eye. There in the distance, exactly where our internet resource had said - icefalls! Water frozen blue against the dark rocks, inviting us out to come test our picks and crampons. What did those people in Bucharest and Brasov know? Here was the climbing we'd hoped for since first landing in Romania. I rushed to grab Susan and we stared out the window together, casting aside all our other plans and reorganizing to head up the valley again. The view from the sun deck at the cabana - spot the ice!

The first train from Brasov to Porumbacu station left at a quarter past 6 AM, so we woke up to an early alarm and went to the edge of dark and quiet old-town Brasov to catch our Bolt to the train station. I couldn't shake the feeling of forgetting something; it felt odd to travel with just one backpack each instead of our usual 6 bags, but given the moderate hike in to the Cabana Negoiu I was happy to only have a single piece of luggage and leave the rest at the Airbnb we'd be returning to in about a week. And these backpacks still bursted with supplies - mainly snacks, since even though we'd made peace with giving in and buying dinners and breakfasts from the mountain hut, we still needed 7 days of lunches. And chocolate bars. We had six nights reserved at Cabana Negoiu, a mountain refuge perched on a forested ridge below Varful Negoiu, Romania's second highest peak, in the Fagaras Mountains, a subrange of the Carpathians that served as a natural barrier between his...

Karakol is a cute little town at the head of Issyk-Kul Lake. In the summer it is a bustling tourist spot, and in the winter it hosts a ski resort. Most of the tourists that we ran into were internal tourists mostly coming from Bishkek. The downside to Karakol is the smog. For such a small town it had worse air quality than Almaty and every evening it seemed to get really bad as many people seemed to heat their homes with coal or wood burning stoves. We also never did figure out the industry there but there were a few very short smoke stacks in town that would send some noxious fumes into neighboring apartment complexes in the evenings. Ah fresh mountain air! View of Karakol from the ski resort

Frozen Barskoon Falls high over the valley From Almaty in Kazakhstan we took a bus to Kyrgyzstan as we had read about a very cool ice climbing area there. The bus meandered slowly west to the border with Kyrgyzstan. Once there we had to get all of our stuff off the bus, waddle to the Kazakh border desk, stand in the wrong line, and waddle to another line. Once in the correct line, I was met with a border agent’s halting English and I didn’t recognize the name of Almaty’s airport so I got a few more questions, but eventually he allowed me to leave Kazakhstan. Ben benefited from my hard work and made it through with no questions.

It's not the capital (partly due to the major earthquake fault just a few kilometers away), but Almaty is the biggest city and by far the most metropolitan area of Kazakhstan. It didn't really exist until the early 20th century, and expanded greatly during Kazakhstan's time under the USSR, so all the construction is relatively new and most of it distinctly Soviet. The city takes its name from the Russian word for apple, "elma", and the plentiful nearby orchards combine with its cultural significance to fuel its reputation as "The Big Apple" of Kazakhstan. The Alatau mountains towering south of Almaty

We left Dr. Aslan's nice hotel and flew to Erzurum Türkiye. We were unsure about the place we had booked here as it had zero reviews and two different addresses on Booking.com. We messaged to ask what to tell the taxi driver and she called and talked to the driver to get us where we needed to go. This place was BIG. It had an extra bedroom and a living room. We moved our stuff in and quickly had to get to the grocery store as this place was lacking in some basics like toilet paper - which I can forgive in a culture that doesn't use it...but there also wasn't any hand soap...We were looking at staying at this place for about 3 weeks so it wasn't a huge deal to pick up some stuff as we probably would have run out during the stay anyway. The place needed a handyman though and there were a lot of small things that were NOT great for a long stay. Oh well, live and learn. It was above a grocery store and that was awesome! After so many weeks of having limited access ...