Can't download my photos from icloud

I'm a photographer that travels a lot. I guess I've never needed to access my own photos while traveling. For some reason my macbook decided to take my storage into its own hands and offloaded all of my exports without asking me. I don't wanna hear answers explaining how macs work or telling me I should have or could have disabled this feature I didn't know existed. I need a solution. This is not a feature I asked for or activated it was the default for some reason. Now I'm stuck in a third world country for a year and can't access any of my photos because the internet is too slow. Everytime I try to open an old photo it tells me it can't connect to the server.

[Edited by Moderator]