" You were a bit of a goer before you met me," says the economist.
He does love his jokes.
We travel to Goa on the sleeper bus. Needless to say, it's not very expensive.
The bunks are surrounded by red velour curtains and are Indian-people-sized, so the economist and I have to spoon; slick and sweaty, steaming up the windows.
It's very romantic. "Now we have travelled by bus, train and tuk tuk!" he says excitedly, like a small boy who collects modes of transportation.
When the flower children washed their patchouli off and became investment bankers, a core group remained, dedicating themselves to concentrating on developments in music, yoga and recreational drugs.
In the late '80s and early '90s, Goa became home to Goan Trance, a kind of dance party where the music is so boringly repetitive, large amounts of narcotics are required to enjoy it.
Fashions change and the fickle trancers have largely moved on (although New Year's Eve is still a biggie with the Brits), with new global hot spots for Goan Trance popping up, including Brazil, Japan and ...
New Zealand. Go figure.
Goa, once a glorious hibiscus bloom, is these days a little tattered from being plucked and worn behind the ears of so many. And with the soaring murder rate, it's not a very safe place for tourists.
As we staggered off the rickety local bus, three men were being detained for the rape and murder of 15-year-old British tourist Scarlett Keeling.
Scarlett's death was initially listed as drowning by the Goan police, despite the autopsy revealing she had more than fifty wounds and had been sexually assaulted before her death.
Her mother insisting on a second autopsy, the Goan tourism minister was forced to admit that Indian police had attempted a cover-up, fearing that registering a case of murder would affect the Goan tourism industry.
Questions were asked in the Indian media about the parental fitness of Scarlett's mother, revealing an unfortunate Indian/Goan morality.
What sort of mother (asked the editorials) lets a 15-year-old stay in Goa without her (she and the rest of the family were travelling nearby in another state while Scarlett stayed with her tour-guide boyfriend)?
Police allege loose morality and drug-taking on Scarlett's part led to her demise.
In addition to the three men arrested, four others were wanted in connection with Scarlett's death. One of those arrested was her boyfriend.
Also in the news was the trial of charming serial killer Hatchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj. A psychopath of Indian and Vietnamese descent, Sobhraj preyed on Western tourists throughout Southeast Asia during the 1970s.
Nicknamed "the Serpent" and the "Bikini Killer", he posed as a dapper, cultured, man-about-world or mysterious drug dealer, befriending and defrauding backpacking couples on the "hippie trail" and then poisoning, drowning, strangling and burning them.
Skilled at deception and evasion, Sobhraj is a real-life Ripley who committed at least 12 murders that the authorities know of as a means of sustaining his lifestyle of adventure, using his victims' passports and money to move from country to country. Sobhraj had many followers (including several policemen). Assembling a "clan", he wanted to start a criminal family in the style of Charles Manson and the Manson family.
Interrogated by Thai police in Bangkok, Sobhraj was let off the hook because, like the Goans, authorities there feared the negative publicity accompanying a murder trial would harm the county's tourism trade.
Not so easily silenced, however, was Dutch embassy diplomat Herman Knippenberg, who was investigating the murder of two Dutch backpackers and suspected Sobhraj - even though he did not know his real name.
Searching Sobhraj's apartment, Knippenberg found a great deal of evidence, such as documents belonging to the victims and poison-laced medicines. He spent decades accumulating evidence against Sobhraj, despite a lack of co-operation at the time by law enforcement authorities.
Meanwhile, Sobhraj continued to get away with murder.
Sobhraj was eventually tried and convicted and was jailed, in India, from 1976 to 1997, leading a life of leisure in prison.
After his release, he retired as a celebrity in Paris but unexpectedly returned to Nepal in 2003, where he was again arrested, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment on July 30, 2010 for murders he had committed there.
His girlfriend, the beautiful 18-year-old daughter of his lawyer, tearfully protested his innocence. Sobhraj loves all this attention, charging large amounts for interviews and film rights.
The subject of four books and three documentaries, his narcissistic overconfidence and overweening belief in his own intelligence is probably what led him to return to a country where authorities were still eager to arrest him.
He just couldn't help himself, like the pyromaniac, stinking of petrol, who returns to the blazing warehouse, standing in the crowd of onlookers.
So... into the heart of darkness we go. The city of Old Goa (Velha Goa) was abandoned to cholera and malaria in 1835, the inhabitants fleeing by palanquin or on foot, never to return. Today all that remains standing are magnificent, empty churches built in laterite (rust-red, iron-rich earth bricks) and lime plaster.
Everything sweats in the heat.
Scaling the lower portions of the baroque Basilica of Bom Jesus (Good Jesus), suspended from the roof by vine harnesses, workers scrub off the day's lichen and clip the border plants. Fanning out from the Basilica's monolithic girth, teams of gardeners attempt to beat back the jungle's voracious appetite. Crows in dark vestments hunch in the niches.
Girded by Ionic, Tuscan and Corinthian pillars and pilasters, Bom Jesus boasts a marble floor inlaid with precious stones, complementing the elaborate gilded altars. Buttresses of light fall from the high windows.
Ironically, this opulent, sumptuous construction was built to protect the mortal remains of a man who lived in self-imposed penury: Saint Francis Xavier, who died of fever on Shangchuan Island, off the south coast of China, in 1552.
The saint is said to have miraculous powers of healing.
When Saint Francis' body was exhumed, 76 days after his death, it was found fresh - incorrupt - but no embalming had been done. Before it was placed in a silver reliquary, two years after his death, the doctors of Goa examined the body again and it was still fresh.
Born into the castle of Xavier and an exceptional student and athlete, Francis Xavier dropped out of university in Paris to travel the world, devoting himself to the poor and needy.
Thrice shipwrecked, starved and attacked by pirates, he wrote of his time in Goa, "... never have I been happier, nor more continuously".
But then saints are all about mortification of the flesh, and Xavier's oft-exhumed corpse has been subjected to some tribulations. One of his big toes was bitten off in 1554 by a Portuguese lady who took it away as a relic. In 1890, the other toe fell off and a good portion of an arm was severed and sent to Rome. What's left rests under a crocheted blanket of silver stars.
My own flesh is quite mortified, thank you. A committee of physicians would never describe me as "fresh".
The Goan air is a bathtub of lukewarm water which you slosh through. It drags at your steps like dreams of running away. Fetid, dank and mildewed, Goa smells like a bach closed up for winter.
Surrounded by purgatorial jungle; coconut trees, bamboo, teak and cashew alive with kingfishers, mynas and parrots, and you can almost hear the trees panting with the effort of absorbing the hot breath of skulking foxes and bug-rooting boar. Goa has a high snake population but, on the upside, there aren't that many rats.
In the sixteenth century, compelled to found a base from where they could control the seas, and thanks to Vasco de Gama's discovery of a sea route, the Portuguese came to Goa to convert the heathen, wearing tights and puffy-sleeved embroidered capes made of beaver fur.
From a land of brimstone they brought the Inquisition and, despite their ridiculous dress, the Portuguese "subdued" the Goans, carrying out a wave of conquest, colonisation and enforced conversions.
Water torture and the rack proved extremely successful (nobody laughed at their Van Dyke beards after that), and Goa remained Portuguese territory for the next 450 years, until reclaimed by India with the help of the British in 1961.
In the state museum, amid the wooden pieta and portraits of Portuguese governors, the Inquisition's black wooden table squats like a malevolent beetle.
Seen from the front, the table is supported by two upright lions and a rather squat, pot-bellied eagle. A reminder that the committee's purpose was to strike fear and compliance into the hearts of those about to be interrogated (and a sneaky inside joke), the rear of the table is festooned with carvings of faces racked with pain.
In the portrait gallery, painted life-size on lacquered wood, viceroys and governors pose, pompously futile, in elaborate horse-hair wigs, coloured hose and velvet frock coats.
Beringed hands hold steel helmets and heavy swords. Once a year, a new batch of Portuguese settlers arrived by ship, fervent with political ambition, to replace their fellows fallen to disease or snake bite.
Outside, it's 35degC with 98% humidity. Curious, I buy some paan from a roadside vendor. It tastes like minty dirt wrapped in a dock leaf.
Wandering the empty cathedrals under the pious gaze of mould-patina'd saints and cardinals, witnessing Christ's agony on the elaborately carved, gilt-framed Stations of the Cross, you wonder at the relentless religious zeal of the Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Carmelites and Theatines.
All this frenzied decoration, all this gold, silver, ornate chandeliers, jewelled lanterns, stained-glass windows. All the icons, saints and marble angels, the very Portuguese-looking Jesuses, the smoke-stained oil paintings of the Devil being thwarted - all this stuff speaks of the staggering hubris required to bend an entire population to your will - only for these considerable monuments to your success, chapels, churches, convents, monasteries and cathedrals, to stand empty four centuries later.
Once, you thought yourself so important. Time passes and you are reduced to nothing more than a rich man's bones, lying forgotten and unprayed-for beneath the remains of the ruined altar of the church of Saint Augustine. The elaborate carved headstone bearing your coat of arms is now just a weather-beaten flagstone in a roofless ruin, scuffed by the feet of atheist tourists.
Somewhere beneath all this moss and tendrils of vine lie the mortal remains of the martyred Queen, Ketevan of Georgia; long searched for, never found.
The main road bisecting the Old City, Rua Direta, was once lined with stately buildings where bankers, jewellers, slaves, musicians, embroiderers and tobacconists provided the Portuguese with everything their hearts desired.
Carriages rattled and Arabian horses high-stepped. The pleasure fest was short-lived and towards the close of the 16th century, Goa was already in its last flourish.
The Dutch were taking over the world and the Portuguese couldn't afford to keep up the luxury and splendour of Goa.
Ships stopped coming, and an epidemic of cholera broke out, wiping out both the population and any hope of continued commercial activity. The city was reduced to a ruin.
The monuments remaining today are "protected and nurtured by the Archaeological Survey of India", but even this esteemed society cannot prevail against the ravages of those cruel twins, Nature and Time.
Read it
Lisa Scott's Travels with my Economist: Encounters with India (David Bateman, $30) will be launched on Thursday, September 20.