Sudden Disappearance in Shang Simla

[Sherry]

I don't know if anyone has posted this or not, but I've acquired a weird problem.

My sims family(The Goth) live in Sunset Valley, they was able to travel way ago (when the game just started).
But suddenly when it was around week 3 to 4 I make them travel to Shang Simla.
The travel loading bar does move. The city was loaded fine.
and then

here is the surprise : my sim family disappear just like that.
The camera zoom in to the Base Camp, but no sims that I can control. Their portrait at the left side of the screen is not there too.
Whenever I tried to click anything, it just have a bar said no interactions available.

Help! *do the panic hands waving*

[rodeo199]

Do you have a save of before they traveled? If you do, go back to that. If not, I don't think you can save it sorry.

[Pam]

This sounds like the well known traveling bug.  And rodeo199 is right.  You can't recover from this; the only thing you can do is go back to a previous save.

[Sherry]

how faraway from the traveling time should I go back to?

coz I do have the save right at the time before travel (around 1 hour before traveling), but whenever I tried to travel them to Shang SImla They always disappear there...

[rodeo199]

Quit the game ( if it's open) and try clearing your caches, then try travelling again from the save before travel. Hope this helps!

[Janna]

I had that problem, along with several others, and for me, I had to uninstall one of my expansion packs and delete some saved games.  It was just too much for my computer, it couldn't handle it all.  It is an old computer and I bought it for school work, not for playing games. 

How many expansion packs, world (store) towns, store stuff and such do you have and how powerful is your computer?  How many saved games do you have?  I didn't realize that there was a limit to how many games you can save, depending on how big the file is.  I have around 40, but most are small ones, where I created sims to used as mates when my sim can't find one in a town that I am doing a personal dynasty. 
Doing project stories, I have created some "seed" families, three for each town, with seven towns, that is 21 files, but they have just the family and the kids they had, at toddler stage.  The others are from the three project families and a few others.   
If you have a lot of saved towns, with them (files) being quite big, then that could be your problem.
Do the clean cache as suggested and it that doesn't work, look at what you have on your computer and see if it could be too much for it to handle.  I don't know what type you have (what I know about computers would make a small paragraph), how many expansion packs and such; but that could be part of the problem.

Either way, you have lost anything from after the save.  If you saved your game before you left and didn't save while in China or one of the other countries, you can go to your last save.  If you saved from in China, they you will have to go to an earlier save and will have lost from the last save.   

[Wai]

It is often possible to recover a "lost" family while travelling.  Obviously, you need to try this immediately.  When the screen appears, minus the family, you can still get into edit town mode.  When in that screen, select your home town to edit.  When you get there, choose to edit any lot, pick up and place something elsewhere on the lot (example, move a tree in the garden).  Return to your game.  Do not save when prompted to do so.  This will force the game to reload your holiday destination and usually you will get the family back.