"Hubby", as he's now known, spent his last few weeks before our departure cultivating himself a beard, presumably in an effort to look more scruffy and fit in with all those wild gap year students we'll be rubbing aching shoulders with. He now looks only vaguely like the man I've been going out with for about a year, but he bears absolutely no resemblance to his passport photograph.

As a result, he spends far longer in immigration queues while I tap my foot and try not to look as though my backpack is quite as heavy as it is. But no, I don't I regret packing the hair straighteners, or both first aid kits, or the extra pair of shoes. With every burdened step, I try to picture how toned my biceps are going to look when I get home. Meanwhile, the humidity has made my hair ridiculous. I am forced to embrace the curls.

We get lucky on day two and are scouted on the street to appear as extras in a Bollywood movie entitled "Fashion", released in India this month. After an exciting but sweaty 12-hour shoot at the city’s Mehboob Studios (both of us dehydrated in our ill-fitting, too-hot costumes) we both agreed we were ready to leave muggy, hectic Mumbai and head for Goa by train.

It transpired that we’d have to wait five days to catch a train out of the city. The Ganesh festival, which celebrates the revered Hindu elephant god, was in full swing, so everything was booked up.

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BACKGROUND

• Start a new life abroad

• How to set up your own travel blog

• Lose a year and find yourself

• Take a break: life-changing travels

Related Internet Links

• The complete guide to gap year travel

Related Links

• 19 things you must know before going to India

Where we disagreed was how to go about buying the tickets - and whose fault it was when we ended up the victims of a full-blown train ticket scam, executed by a polite Sikh gentleman to glorious effect. Argument number one swiftly ensued.

Row number two happened in a train sleeper carriage halfway between Goa and Kerala - something about the cap of the bottled water, if I remember rightly. Spat number three kicked off when the Beard complained about how heavy my backpack is, while I hissed at him about why on earth he offered to carry it in the first place, seeing as I can manage perfectly well myself (a white lie). After that, we began to lose count.

The bickering became a daily occurrence, as commonplace as popping our malaria pills and scratching our insect stings, and followed us like a tuk-tuk tout from Goa to Kerala to Bangalore, and all the way up north to the golden triangle. There was even a mild arsenic exchange at the Taj Mahal, the ultimate monument to love.

For a couple whose only cross words in the past were the sorts you find in the back of a newspaper, it came as a shock. This, despite the fact that everyone told us - with a smattering of schadenfreude, perhaps - that this trip it would be a serious test of our relationship. If we make it through this, our friends whispered excitedly, we can do pretty much anything else together.

We do want to make it. So we've reacted like any other normal human beings would, under duress. We blame someone else. In this case, we blame India. It's the heat! The stress! The constant paranoia, after our train scam experience, that someone is trying to rip us off. The bed bugs; the exhaustion from moving on so regularly; the slow internet connection; the terrorist bomb blasts in different cities every few weeks; and finally, the dreaded Delhi belly.

Andy succumbed, fittingly, on the very morning we flew into Delhi, after a great weekend we spent with an ex-pat friend in Bangalore. The tummy bug ushers in a whole new level of intimacy, the sights and sounds (among other things) an assault on my senses. My heart melts as I feed him his rehydration sachets and rub his feverish brow. I notice his beard now carries a faint whiff of curry. For us, there’s definitely no going back after this.

Dara Flynn

HIS SIDE

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