Diese Bilder haben wir 3 Jahre nach der Aufnahme endlich aus unserer defekten Speicherkarte wiederherstellen können. Die ersten 8 Bilder sind noch aus Westchina, die letzen 8 aus Kirgisien.

I should tell the story why the publication of these pictures comes 3 years delayed. The reason is that we wern't able to retrieve the pictures from out memory flashcard. Four weeks later into the trip, when we were already cycling in Kyrgyzstan, our digital camera had a sudden blackout. Whatever button I pressed, the camera ignored it - until I took off the batteries. When I placed the batteries back into their slots, the functionality of the camera was back to normal. But to my astonishment, the camera claimed that there are "no pictures available", although I believed to have taken 316 pictures already. My astonishment turned into deep disappointment when I realized that I wasn't able to recover the pictures. Back home, I asked several photo-shops for help, I also submitted the broken memory card to professional recover-services in Germany and in China. They all returned the card saying that they simply couldn't do it. A reasonable decision would have been to give up after 10 different attempts. But I kept on trying, because I couldn't believe that the actual memory chip was broken. A flash card consists of many sensitive electronic parts that could also be the reason for the failure. I tried to retrieve the data myself together with a friend of mine who is an electrician. But at the end it turned out to be too complicated. But I was not willing to surrender, in particular when looking back to several day-long hikes through deserts and climbs on mountains for reaching confluence points. One day, I came across the website http://card-recovery.biz/. It appeared to be professional, so I submitted the card one more time. A week later, they delivered all the pictures to me!

The first 8 pictures are taken in West China (Xinjiang Province) and the last 7 pictures in Kyrgyztan.