We had booked an extremely cheap hotel opposite Haridwar railway station to dump our bags and have a rest in before getting the night train to Lucknow. It was a throwback to the places we remembered staying at when we last travelled in India 25 years ago; it did not seem overly clean – but hey, we were only going to spend a few hours there. The guy in charge was friendly enough and asked Tim if he had any English coins ‘Give to me, not to any of the other people here.’ Tim obliged with 10p he still had left in his wallet.

We set off to explore the town. It was busier than Rishikesh and full of Indian pilgrims. I had heard that there were two main temples connected by a cable car. so we planned to visit those, but first we needed to eat. My stomach was feeling a lot better, although I had now caught the cold Tim had had in Rishikesh. We decided to risk visiting a ‘dhaba’ – a roadside cafe that provides simple food. The one we picked had good ratings on google, they seemed to be cooking everything fresh and lots of people were eating there. We ended up having a delicious thali meal and buoyed with confidence left to hail a rickshaw to take us to the temple.

After checking with several colleagues and somebody else in a nearby shop, the rickshaw driver we picked seemed to understand where we were asking him to take us. His vehicle was electric, far preferable to the petrol versions. The electric rickshaws will hopefully take over the petrol versions in the towns of India in the future as they are so much less polluting. It felt a bit like being driven on a decorated milk float (for those people who are old enough to remember milk floats).

We reached the temple which didn’t seem that much like the description I had read about in ‘The Lonely planet guide’, but we took our shoes off as directed and started wandering around. The rickshaw driver pointed out a woman selling flowers at the temple entrance so we bought a small plate of marigolds for a modest fee. We soon realised that this was a not the temple that we had intended to visit. Nevertheless it was a chilled out and interesting space with a little path leading into a wooded area with various shrines. In one shrine were a group of sadhus who asked Tim, ‘You like smoke?’ Tim explained to them that for him, those days are over.

The rickshaw driver was waiting for us out the front and took us to the market for an inflated fee. He had had a good day. The market and the nearby ghats were an assault on the senses, tiny alleyways selling anything and everything. We were quickly in need of some refreshment and found a posh restaurant attached to a hotel with air con. We gave a sigh of relief as by this time we were exhausted and soaked in sweat. After that we headed back to our hotel hoping for a rest before getting on the night train.

We had only been settled down for a nap for about half an hour when Tim leaped off the bed.

‘Bed bugs, they’re biting me,’ he said.

‘I can’t feel anything,’ I said sleepily. ‘I don’t think we should worry. You only have to go as far as Hollington to get bed bugs these days.’

I regretted my laziness when I found a trail of bed bug bites under one arm when I showered at our hotel in Lucknow the next day.

Following the bed bug panic, we headed off a bit earlier than planned to catch the train to Lucknow. We were sharing our sleeper carriage with a group of 19 year olds in their second year of medical studies in Lucknow. They had been on a trip to Rishikesh together. It was like tagging along with child 1 or child 2 and their friends. Same giggling that may or may not be directed at you, same chatting into the night, same competitive games of UNO! We also had a discussion with an intense Indian Muslim who I thought the young doctors were a little rude to. He was desperate to move to the UK and do social work. He told me that a man had offered to get him a visa if he paid him a lot of money and I said that a genuine agency would not be doing that if he had the right sort of skills and experience (which to be fair he didn’t seem to). I did not think that I would be having a discussion about potential modern slavery on a night train in India!

In the end the train lulled me off to sleep and the next thing I knew was Tim shaking me and telling me we had arrived in Lucknow.