Read the extract from Kayal’s diary entry regarding her Nepal Trek, and fill in the blanks with the correct tense form of the verbs given in brackets.
DAY 1: We (1) _______ (leave) Anna International Airport in Chennai two days ago catching a direct flight to Kathmandu in Nepal. We (2) _______ (spend) a day sightseeing. Kathmandu is full of people, rickshaws and the smell of sandalwood. I’ve never (3) _______ (be) on a trip like this before. So I’m really excited.
DAY 2: It (1) _______ (rain) when we reached Pokhara, Nepal’s second largest city, and saw the snowy peaks of the Himalayas for the first time. We. (2) _______ (reach) Pokhara after a hair-raising six-hour bus journey along very narrow roads with a lot of hairpin bends. The bus (3) _______ (be) so full that one person had to share the driver’s seat.
DAY 3: We (1) _______ (begin) our trek at last. We are at about 900 metres and the weather is warm and humid. For lunch we had chips and yak cheese sandwiches. I didn’t like them very much. I’m thrilled that we (2) _______ (pitch) tents for our camps in the dense forests.
DAY 4: Yesterday a landslide (1) _______ (block) our path and we had to use ropes to get over it. This morning we walked along the river Kali Gandaki through dense forests of oak trees and we pitched our camp at Tukuche below the Annapurna mountain range. The main danger in addition to landslides, is ‘yak attack’. Yaks (3) _______ (be) not dangerous but you have to be careful if you meet a herd of them because they can push you off the sides of the mountain.
DAY 5: We met a lot of children on our trek through the villages. They (1) _______ (play) in the pool of muddy rain water as we left the place. We have already climbed 2,400 metres. Up here, it never (2) _______ (rain) and there are no trees. It (3) _______ (be) windy and dusty and I am always thirsty.
DAY 6: Yesterday we (1) _______ (go) up to the mountainside of the township of Mukthinath, at 3,600 metres. The thin air with less oxygen there (2) _______ (leave) us breathless. We (3) _______ (feel) that we couldn’t go any further. We (4) _______ (drink) a lot of extra fluids to prevent altitude sickness.
DAY 7: We turned around today and started to descend to Jomosom. As we went down, the oxygen filled our blood again and we seemed to (1) _______ (fly) instead of walking.
DAY 8: We went back to Pokhara in a small plane yesterday. It (1) _______ (excite) when we flew between the mountain peaks. We arrived in Kathmandu this afternoon and we
(2) (spend) our last few hours in shopping. We leave for Chennai tomorrow. We’ve had a trip of a lifetime.
