I would go down. But that’s pretty easy on the Himalayan treks, when you fly into Tibet that’s quite hard. The only time we’ve had a problem with altitude was in Peru where we were on a group tour, so no option other than to stick to their timetable, but we flew in and James immediately had a killer headache which put him in bed in terrible pain for a day. After that he just had to get on with trekking to Macchu Pichu. One other girl in the group had it too. He improved with time, but the girl was pretty rough the whole time, the headaches never left her. I don’t think we’d even heard of Diamox back then. We just had coca tea and paracetamol, oxygen might have been nice. We gave the kids half a diamox a couple of times, nothing bad happened and the diamox had no effect on the hypoxia tingles in my fingers, I had that with or without the diamox. We didn’t get close to 4 L either, it makes you feel really ill. “They” say you should drink that amount in the tropics too, well, we live in the tropics and we never do. Maybe that’s bad, I don’t know. Probably not as bad as smoking or eating bacon. We just follow our bodies. I know if I’m dehydrated. Heck, I ran 10 Km in the tropics yesterday and probably had a litre of water, max, all day. But yeah, I wouldn’t take little kids to altitude, ever, certainly not if they were so young that they couldn’t accurately describe their symptoms. But black fingers – nice! One of our neighbours had black fingers once, some disease she had. Weird stuff. I think 3,500m is the cut off where altitude sickness becomes possible, not sure, I’ll go check the post the kids wrote on acclimatisation. UPDATE Just checked, it’s over 2,400m – I think. So 3,500m is high! Namche Bazaar is around 3,400m and I really wouldn’t want to fly in to that altitude! Lake Titicaca is 3,800 according to Wikipedia – no wonder he felt it!

Yep, I had altitude problems too, shortly after arriving to Leh, Ladakh, India. It’s not very high, somewhere around 3500 m. We waited for a few hours but then it turned so bad, that we had to call a doctor. I got some kind of injection and Diamox and something else prescribed. I had black fingertips from the Diamox, but I definitely didn’t have to go for a pee so often. I was told to drink 4 litres of water too, but that’s impossible! Would love to go back, but I don’t know what to do with the kids if they get difficulties too. I’m not sure I’d want to give them Diamox, mine are still so small.

But he did have plenty of time to look at the stars..he was quite happy with that. They’re very beautiful at 5,000 m .