(CNN) — Nupur Gupta was nearing the end of a two-week stint teaching at a yoga retreat in Goa, India.

It was February 2019 and the weather was balmy, bathing Goa’s famous beaches in a warm glow. The sea glistened, invitingly.

In between yoga practice, Gupta always made time for a swim.

On this particular day, she floated out further than she usually would. When she realized how strong the current was, it was too late. The water had started to pull her under.

She tried not to panic.

“I knew somewhere that, ‘Okay, if I constantly, and with consistency, keep swimming, I might make it,'” she tells CNN Travel today.

Whenever Gupta attempted to crawl back to shore, the current dragged her under and she’d fight her way back to the surface, gasping for air.

“Then I saw this man coming towards me.”

This was Attila Bosnyak, a financial adviser in his forties hailing from Hungary but based in the Netherlands.

Coincidentally, Bosnyak was a student at Gupta’s yoga retreat where, he says, he’d been…