Roorkee to Rishikesh - Aversion Therapy

This morning I started to worry about cycling in India.  When I'd observed the traffic here out of a car, a tuk tuk or a rickshaw, it just looked bonkers and dangerous.

After two days actual riding, I'd become completely desensitised to danger.  Things that at home would be classed as a near miss, and would leave me feeling alarmed happen to me every minute over here.  A truck missing me by a couple of inches seems good enough.

Too much driving and riding at home becomes automatic, and you can easily switch off but here no.  You have to pay attention the whole time, and if something nuts happens, or if you see something nuts, there's no point in trying to tell Dean, because while you're telling him, something even more nuts will happen.

Yesterday I overtook a crane on the inside in a scene reminiscent of Terminator 3, and I felt fine.  At one point I tried to follow Dean in between two trucks and the gap between them starting disappearing from a small V into nothing so I just calmly backed out of there.

This morning we had 42 miles to go to Rishikesh and it turned out to be all on single carriageway, and as far as Haridwar it was the same as yesterday.  Totally flat, with no signs, lots of crisps on sale, but no proper shops, unless you want to buy lumps of metal, sticks or bricks.

When we reached Haridwar we finally saw the Ganges and some of the heavy traffic tailed off into the town.

As we got closer to Rishikesh it started to look a lot more touristy, there were hotels, and the Indians we could see were dressed very much like Westerners, and there was a lot of kite flying going on.  And we started to see shops with things in them that you could buy, and we started to pass some internet cafes and then we went down a hill into Rishikesh itself, and it was manic and there was some sort of parade going on.

We went down to the banks of the Ganges, and it seemed altogether more tranquil, but we really wanted to stay at Bandari Swiss Cottages, and we had a lot of disorientation and we had a lot of trouble finding it.  After about an hour we took about our tenth wrong turn, and we passed a lady clearing rubbish from the roadside, who shouted 'Oh, Well Done!' at us.  She was obviously English and so I went back to talk to her and ask her for directions.  And she was lovely, she was called Lorna and she spends our winters in India and our summers running a youth hostel on the Isle of Islay in Scotland.  And she told us that it's quite normal to feel overwhelmed after only a few days in India and she seemed pretty impressed with what we'd done so far in only a week.

She told us to get ourselves down and have a dip in the Ganges and all our stresses will melt away.  And she also told us to relax into our stress, and we'd soon start to enjoy ourselves.  It was good news, and it was lovely to talk to another English person after being a stranger in a strange land for so long.

We found our accommodation shortly after, and it's cheap and on a beautiful hillside, and surprise, surprise it has a double bed.  And it has monkeys swinging through the trees outside the balcony, and birds I've never seen before.  And internet access.  So I'm catching up with my blog, and it feels good to be able to unload after such a bonkers three days.  But I made it from Delhi to Rishikesh, on a bike.  153 miles of craziness like you wouldn't believe but I'm here, and now it's time to relax.

Meerut to Roorkee - Welcome to the Twilight Zone

We didn't hang about in the hotel in Meerut on Friday morning.  We had a long way to go, and we didn't want to get more abuse by trying to get breakfast, so we cleared off.

Cycling-wise the first 30 miles after Meerut went pretty smoothly.  Not long after we set off we met a couple of cyclists on road bikes, one of them who races for a professional team in India.  He invited us back to his house for a bit, but we decided we'd better press on, as we had a long way to go.

It was dual carriageway all the way, and at one point I said that I preferred it to cycling in England.  The roads were wide with not much on, and apart from the odd cow or motorbike coming the wrong way down the road at you, the cycling was pretty relaxed.  At one point we joined a toll road, and this really seemed to thin the traffic out for a while.

However, the world outside the road was another matter.  One of the main problems I'm having with India is that I don't know what anything is, and I don't understand what anyone is doing.  We rode past mile after mile of rubble, dust and people but I couldn't tell if we were looking at houses, shops, restaurants, garages or what.  Lots of places sell pop and crisps, which are hanging outside, but there are no signs to tell you where you can buy anything else.

Unlike in Delhi where I was constantly being pestered by people wanting me to go with them, in the more rural areas outside the city we just got stared at a lot.  Some people waved and said hello, and a lot of motorcyclists pulled up alongside and stopped to chat and shake our hands.  One guy was really impressed that I was wearing short sleeves, but I told him this is as hot as it ever gets in England.  Dean said all the staring was good practice for having one of those type of job interviews where they try and provoke and unsettle you.

We did stop after the first couple of hours and buy some pop and crisps, and it seemed ironic to me that junk food that we try not to feed our children, is the only stuff you can buy at times over here.

Dean had wanted to stock up early on more coffee, porridge and some other essentials but I thought we'd pass somewhere on the way, so I wasn't too worried.  The road from Meerut turned out to be like one really big service station.  Millions of eating places with hot food in tubs, and lots of places selling crisps, but nowhere to buy stuff to cook yourself.  Or if there was, we couldn't tell.  There was lots of advertisiing on buildings, but it wasn't advertising things that were in that building.  We did stop at one place that looked like a shop, but it only seemed to sell tennis balls, and really small cardboard boxes, which could have had anything in.  We asked them where we could buy coffee and they told us to go 8 kilometres back where we'd come from.  They didn't seem to understand we didn't want a coffee, we wanted to buy some.

During the day we passed an overturned truck in a bag, a man blocking all four lanes carrying about 20 metres of pipes on a cycle rickshaw, as well as a million others things too mental to have even have absorbed.  We went past a metal bashing shop, a tree bashing shop, saw a boy eating a tree while he was listening to music on his phone.  There was too much to take in.

But the inability to buy anything was really starting to wear us down.  Then mental became mental squared as the toll road ran out and we were suddenly on single carriageway road.  Instead of just having to worry about cows and motorbikes coming the wrong way down the inside, we now starting having to dodge trucks and buses which were on our side of the road trying to overtake other slow vehicles coming the other way.  The hard shoulder was all mud and rubble but at times we had to swerve onto it to get out of the way of bigger things.

Eventually we found a building that looked like a supermarket, and went in.  It was like a supermarket inside as well except for the fact that the shelves were mostly bare.  There were about 7 shelving units, and 3 of them were full of crips and snacks.  After getting a taste for Indian crisps earlier in the day I picked up a few more bags of these but the shopkeeper pointed to a sign telling me that they were all out of date.  I tried to ask him where the non out of date crisps were, but he didn't seem to have any.  I was impressed to see that they had a computerised till but it didn't work, and every price had to be worked out manually.  Dean got some coffee although only a couple of small packets and we got some biscuits.  We also bought something that vaguely resembled pasta, but we couldn't find any porridge.

Although it meant doing 71 miles in a day to get to Roorkee, it was totally flat, so we kept up a good average speed, and on the outskirts of Roorkee we started to see adverts for hotels.  After 40 miles of only seeing shacks and rubble, and not really seeing anywhere unpopulated enough to camp, it was quite a relief to see a hotel.

We pulled in to the Hotel Godiwari and went to see the receptionist.  He was very friendly and spoke quite good English.  Again we asked for single beds, only to be shown a room with a double again.  It was up about 4 flights of stairs and again we couldn't be bothered going out looking for something else, so Dean once again got us a discount, this time down from 1200 to 1000 rupees.  Then a whole team of people surrounded us, at first I thought they were passers by, but eventually I realised they worked there, and they helped us inside with our bikes and bags.  Two of them hung around for ages in the room making conversation, I gave one of them a tip and after a while they cleared off. Again the receptionist had asked for our passport, but this time he did return it as promised, and he also gave us bottled water and some milk to make some coffee.  Half the price of Fawlty Towers and already a better experience.

We went for a meal in the restaurant and it was cheap and delicious (Paneer Butter Massala) with some Butter Nan and the service was good, and the staff genuinely seemed interested and wanting to make sure that we enjoyed our stay.  I left them a 110 rupee tip, partly because there were so many of them I thought it wouldn't work out at much each.  Then we went for a beer in the bar upstairs, which did actually exist, unlike the bar in Meerut, which was a figment of someone's imaginiation.

A bizarre day, but a good one.

Delhi to Meerut - My first attempt at cycling in India

After 3 days in Delhi I was more afraid of Delhi than I was of putting my bike together and getting the hell out of there.  I'd started to think that the constant 'Good Morning Sirs' of the hotel staff were actually 'Oh No, Not You Agains'.  I built my bike on Thursday morning, and then I attempted to check out.

This turned into an admin tangle of epic proportions.  I had to pay my room bill on one bill, I had to pay to store my bike bag on another and settle the minibar bill on a third one.

For 3 days there had been someone outside my room every time I left it asking me if I was checking out.  The day I actually did want to check out there was no one around so I lugged my own bike and three panniers down the stairs to reception.  The hotel staff then crowded round my bike saying things like 'Wow, gears', and generally being astounded by its technological advancement.

As soon as I left the hotel I felt better.  Being on a bike was actually easier than being a pedestrian.  For a start no-one could offer me postcards or to sell me weed, and also I already had a form of transport so I didn't need to hire one, which kept the tuktuk drivers at bay.

I realised straightaway that the best thing to do in the city was pick someone and follow them, and the streets are so crowded there's always someone going your way.  When they peel off, you just follow someone else.

I picked up Dean and we headed out of Delhi.  We had a few wrong turns, one of which involved cycling across twelve lanes of traffic, but I soon realised, if there isn't a gap, you have to make one.  The movement of traffic is very fluid, and most people if they see you, will let you go.

We had a nice chat with some Indian soldiers and they confirmed that we were going the right way.  The army seem to operate in threes over here.  There's a talkative one with a name badge who's the boss, a younger one who chips in the odd words and then a silent stary one with a machine gun over his shoulder who just looks menacing.  They shook our hands and wished us well, except for the mad starey one who just stared.

The cycling was actually good fun at this point.  There were so many categories of vehicle and we were in the top half speed wise.  We were faster than pedestrians, rickshaws, other cyclists, horse drawn vehicles, cow drawn vehicles, some of the tuktuks and some of the mopeds.  There was no such thing as riding in a straight line, it's all weaving, but you have to live in the moment, and despite the odd vehicle or cow coming towards you on the wrong side of the road, it's quite fluid and it works.

Mostly there's a hierarchy, and mostly people ride or drive on the left, but nothing is certain.  The horn isn't used to sound alarm, it's used to say "I'm here!', and the bigger the vehicle, the bigger the horn.  Most of the cars don't have wing mirrors, but there's generally no need to look behind you, because you can tell the size of the approaching thing by the horn sound.  The buses and trucks have the biggest horns and if one of those goes off next to you, it's like an atom bomb going off next to your head.  

I'd expected it to get quite rural once we got out of Delhi, but it was people all the way to Meerut.  We hardly saw a field, it was just wall to wall people.

It was all dual carriageway or wider for the whole first day's ride, to Meerut.  We hadn't set off till lunchtime, so when it got to about 5 o'clock we thought we should probably stop.  We hadn't really understood the scale of the map so we were thinking Meerut would be a small town.  It is compared to Delhi, but it's actually probably about the same size as the whole of Leeds, so riding into it to look for somewhere to stay could have taken hours.  We passed a place at the roadside, the largest place we'd seen so far.  It was called The Big Bite Food Resort, and there was a very colourful Indian party going on there. 

We went in and enquired about a room.  About half an hour later and after having to walk about a mile around the complex, they showed us a room.  It wasn't bad, but it was the same price as the one in Delhi and it seemed to have nothing actually working in it, including the TV and the wifi.  Also, it had a double bed rather than the twin beds we'd asked for.  Dean managed to get 10% off the price for this, and the bed looked pretty wide, in fact wide enough for three, so I was confident there wouldn't be any accidental crossovers.  We couldn't be bothered to spend another half an hour backing out of the place, so we took the room.  The rate was 2300 rupees which is about 30 quid, and on reflection it was crap value for money. The receptionist insisted on payment up front, and he also insisted on taking our passports for photocopying.  On reflection the Big Bite part of the name probably refers to the big bite the place takes out of your wallet.  It should probably be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act, if they have one in India, because it barely qualifies as a resort either.  A more accurate name for the place might have been the Small Bite Shithole. 

The hotel turned out to have been modelled on Fawlty Towers, except without the politeness. We went for a meal in the food court.  A young man tried to take out order, but as soon as he had started to write it down, another much ruder man came over and demanded to know what we wanted. When I said we needed more time to decide, he claimed not to understand what I was saying although his English was otherwise pretty good.  Under pressure I tried to order a something massala but he told me that was no good because it was gravy, so I ordered chicken curry and rice.  When it came, I'm not certain it was chicken because the joints that were in the sauce didn't look like joints I've ever seen on a chicken, but I ate it anyway, the sauce wasn't bad.

I gave the younger first waiter quite a big tip with the bill, partly to annoy the second waiter and off we went.  

A nice surprise when we got back to the room was a phone call from Ruth and Stephen, although Ruth took some persuading to believe that I was actually doing stuff over here, and not just hiding in the room.

The truth is, I've hardly stopped doing stuff since I got here.  And even before I set off from England I felt like I hadn't stopped doing stuff for about 10 days before that.  With the visa, and the travel arrangements, and the putting the bike together arrangements, then the flight over here, the hanging round in the airport looking for stuff, the crazy ride to the hotel, meeting Dean and Elsa, a day in Old Delhi, a day in New Delhi, and then putting the bike together and riding my bike here for a day, and all this without sleeping more than about 4 hours a night and not understanding from one minute to the next what the hell is going on, I feel like I've never stopped doing stuff.  As Dean said, there was more stuff I could have done, but it was mostly going on in the evenings, by which time I'd been overloaded to oblivion with so much sensory input during the day that I felt like my head was going to blow off anyway.  So I'm trying to break India down into manageable bite size chunks.  Not really succeeding, but trying.  

Delhi - Daring myself to go outside

After the rickshaw incident last night, I'd retreated back into my comfort zone.  Dean went back to his own hotel last night so I woke up at 9.30 this morning by myself and thought 'Oh Shit, I'm in India'.

I went downstairs and saw the smiley girl on reception and managed to extend my hotel stay another night, and that helped ease the panic a bit.  Then I went and got some breakfast.  Yesterday I tried to control what I got for breakfast, but today I just let them bring me what they thought I needed, which was an omelette and four coffees.

Looking out the window over breakfast, it was back to being a scary movie out there.  All my confidence seemed to have disappeared.  I texted Dean and then tried to ring him but his phone wasn't receiving.  By about 11 I'd changed some more money, and I looked out the window some more, and I thought 'If I don't go out of the hotel soon, I'll have to stay here forever'.

I knew the way to Connaught Place where the cafe and the mobile phone shop were, and I set off walking.  As soon as the doorman opened the door for me, I was out in the noise.  I was really apprehensive being on my own but I thought if I walked quickly and like I knew where I was going, no-one would bother me.

A young well dressed man approached me, and started walking alongside me, telling me he didn't want any money, he was a student and he just wanted to practice his English and he asked me loads of questions and tried to give me directions which I eventually ignored as I did actually know where I was going.

Pretty much as soon as he'd left me another well dressed young man approached me, and it was the same story.  A student, didn't want any money, practising his English.  He did guide me to the mobile phone shop, and then asked me if I wanted to buy any weed.  I said no thanks and he went on his way.

By the time I reached the coffee shop I felt like someone in a slasher movie who'd been running away from people for ages, and I was pleased to be back behind some glass.  I ordered a coffee and shortly after Dean phoned me and thankfully he was just next door in the mobile phone shop so I ordered him a coffee and then I felt a bit more secure.  Safety in numbers etc.

I'd decided after yesterday's claustrophobic end to the day, that I wanted to go somewhere with big open spaces so I persuaded Dean to go with me to New Delhi where the parliament buildings are.  We agreed a 100 rupee fare with a tuktuk driver and we asked him to drop us at India Gate.  He spent the whole bloody trip then telling us we didn't really want to go there because it was all shut and trying to get us to go on a magical mystery tour with him.  We got out near India gate and it was shut for Republic Day tomorrow and there were roadblocks everywhere and armed soldiers and police patrolling all the entrances, so we started to walk round the outside.

Tut tuk drivers kept pulling up and trying to persuade us to go with them, and one guy in particular stopped us about half a dozen times, and kept telling us there was no point in walking because everything was shut.  In the end I stopped telling people where we were going, and if they asked I just said 'Nowhere, we're staying right here'.  I was feeling stressed a) by the tuk tuk drivers and b) because this was my idea and it was turning out to be shit.  Anyway, after some more walking we arrived at India Gate and it was pretty spectacular and it stopped being shit and instead of having to tell tuk tuk drivers to piss off ourselves, the army kept moving them on, which made us think we weren't the only ones they were annoying.

We decided to head for a big Anglican cathedral, I think it's called Church of the Redemption but every road we went down to get to it was blocked off.  With the mosque yesterday a boy at the entrance had refused us entry, with the Christian church it was the whole army who were stopping us getting there.

As we got nearer the Parliament buildings the roads got quieter, we stopped at a roadside tea stall and had some delicious tea for 10 rupees each and then we started to feel the benefit of the closed roads as the incessant pestering by tuk tuk drivers got a lot less frequent.  We were followed for a while by a girl about the same size as Harriet or Rosie who tried to sell us a biro and kept telling us she had no food, and at one point she held my hand but I just kept walking.  Normally at home I'd get concerned if I saw a stray dog wandering around loose, but here I'm brushing off children as if they're not there.  To be honest she looked reasonably well clothed and fed, and besides I don't want a biro.

We then started to see the advantage of all the roadblocks as we got to some big impressive buildings and the roads were closed off so we got to wander around in the road.  It was a bit like being in the area around Buckingham palace but with no traffic around.  We messed about taking some photos and I started to feel better now I was getting some space.  I saw a couple from Calcutta and I offered to take a photograph of both of them together and this descended into 10 minutes of farce, where we discussed various group shot scenarios and no-one had a clue what was going on, but we did eventually take some pictures together.

Then we started walking back towards Connaught Place and stopped at a Sikh Temple (Bangla Sahid Temple).  We went in the tourists entrance, took our shoes and socks off and put a headscarf on which went the wind caught it made me look like a Smurf and went in.  It was very serene and we sat around for a bit, before a Sikh man came up and started talking to us.  At first he was purely informative but then he started to sound a bit political and like he was trying to convert us to Sikhism.  I was glad when he went away, as I was just starting to relax and I didn't feel like talking.

I asked Dean to take loads of photos of me inside the Temple, and I was joking with him that my photo album of this trip is going to be 'Jonathan looking terrified and uneasy at various locations in India'.

As we left the Temple two more tuktuk drivers came up and tried to get us to go with them, so out of sheer pig headedness I went and found one who was looking the other way having a break, and asked him to take us back.  They said something to him, which was probably along the lines of 'What have you got that we haven't?' but I felt like I was taking a tiny bit of control back by picking my own ride.  I'd had strangers accosting me all day telling me they know what's best for me, and where I should go, and for once I wanted to make my own decision.

We got back to the hotel at 5. I'd only been out 6 hours, but to be honest it felt like weeks.  For someone who can be a wallflower in social situations I'd felt assailed on all sides all day, and I was glad to get back in the hotel.  Dean made me a cup of tea in the room, using the kettle I'd never noticed was in there, and I laid on the bed for a bit, and felt pretty much wiped out from the day.

We went up to the rooftop terrace and had a drink, and I felt safe again and secure.  I feel like I can only take India in small doses and I was glad to have the hotel as a refuge from the craziness.  I can't stay here forever though, but I'm still adjusting to the sensory overload and the attention that comes with so obviously being a foreigner here.  I still don't feel like unpacking a bike, but I'd like to get to Rishikesh somehow, as it looks like it would be a lot more relaxed place to be than here.

Impressions of Delhi - a moving museum

I'm in Delhi and I've had a very varied and mad day. 

Four main episodes which I'll try and cover in more depth later, but I want to go on the rooftop terrace to see the sunset and have a coffee now.

I think Dean thought I would want to go and see lots of museums while I was here, but there's no need.  Almost everything I see is captivating in its own right.  We sat and had a coffee while we were waiting for 20 minutes for some photos to get developed this morning and I was transfixed by what I could see out of the window.  In England it's very obvious when people are at work, and when people are not, but here work and life seem to blend together.  Shops are houses and houses are shops.  Some people's shops are just blankets in the street, and that's probably where they live too, so they never close as such.  And there's rubble everywhere, but that doesn't stop people sweeping and cleaning their little bit of street.  They just part the rubble, wash the street and carry on.

There's so much paperwork here.  Took us about an hour for Dean to buy an Indian sim card today. He needed passport photos, his passport, proof of where he's staying, a certificate signed by all four grandparents, and a full body search.  If that's buying a sim card, I'd hate to try and buy a train ticket.  And yesterday when I checked in to the hotel I had to fill about 4 different forms in by hand, even though I'd already filled everything in online from home.  The hotel is great, and the staff couldn't be more helpful but after 8 hours on a plane, 3 hours trying to get out of the airport and an hour in a taxi I wasn't in the right frame of mind to fill several forms in.

After looking at things out of the window we went on a Tuk tuk ride.  Absolutely hilarious.  Like a theme park ride but better.  we were in lane 6 out of 6 and we needed to be in lane 1 so he just cut across the traffic at 90 degrees.  Like trampolining and ceilidh dancing.  You can't help but laugh.  And a lovely man too.  Not pushy but friendly and smiley.  Ruth says I have no lane discipline on roundabouts but I went on a roundabout today that I couldn't even tell was one.  There were vehicles everywhere.  I can't decide if Indians are the world's worst drivers or the world's most brilliant drivers, they have amazing spatial awareness, and they use every inch of road.  I was assured before I left that they don't have road rage here, but I saw two episodes or it today, the second of which nearly ended in a physical fight, so I think they do after all.

The tuk tuk driver dropped us at the Gandhi Memorial Garden, but it was shut so we went to the Gandhi Museum instead.  I cried.  Really.  I just felt incredibly emotional in there.  There's a sign in the doorway that says 'Violence is Suicide', and lots of other Gandhi quotes and it just broke me up.  But in a good way.  As if the stress of deciding to go, and then going started to fall away.

Then we sat on the steps of a mosque in the sun in Old Delhi and I started to feel really relaxed.  It was lovely and warm and there was a nice atmosphere and we ate some of Kat's flapjack.  We tried to go in the mosque but we didn't want to pay so the young lad on the door told us to go away.  He wanted to charge us for camera use, but we didn't want to use a camera, and it was supposed to be free entry, but he just sent us packing.  Then I tried to go to the toilets near the Mosque.  Not only did you have to crouch for a Number Two you had to kneel for a Number One and this totally threw me and I had to walk out and hold it till later.  I sent Dean in for a look and a kindly Sikh man persuaded him to do a kneely down pee but it wasn't for me.

Then we went on a cycle rickshaw ride round Old Delhi.  This took claustrophobia to entirely new levels.  Tiny streets smaller than the Shambles in York with heavy traffic on them, and I was naive and didn't fix a price with the driver and it ended up being quite expensive, and I was just relieved to get back to the hotel in the end.  He was showing off a bit and riding on the wrong side of the road and aiming for stuff, but it was possibly the most cramped i've ever felt in my life.  Dean and I have had a lengthy discussion about this guy, and we can't decide if he was an Oscar winning actor doing a virtuoso performance on two naive tourists or if he was a proud native showing off his native area, and wanting us to genuinely have a good experience.  He did lay it on a bit thick, like stopping at a kiosk to buy energy gel, and showing us how much he'd been sweating, but the streets were bloody awful in places and he did have to get off and push.  And we did make him take us back to the hotel which was miles away.

Having reflected on the rickshaw ride over dinner I've realised that part of the reason I didn't enjoy it is that the guy wanted to take us down lots of streets looking at shops.  A lot of the streets are themed, so far example there's a spice district, there seems to be an entire district selling wheel trims, and there was an entire shop unit selling ball bearings.  And I hate shopping.  For example, I hate going to the Metro Centre.  And Old Delhi is like the Metro Centre but made of dark matter.  Imagine shopping at the Metro Centre if it was shrunk to a tenth of its size and if it was full of trucks, and taxis and people on trikes, and people trying to reverse cars at you.  And imagine if all the shoppers lived in the shops.  And the streets were full of people wanting to show you round.

I wonder if I'll be any more confident in social situations after I get back.  I can't imagine being worried about knowing the system in an English pub after trying to get round Old Delhi by cycle rickshaw.

I'm going to try and stay here at this hotel another night tomorrow as I'm still settling in.  They will store my bike bag here for me until the end of my trip for virtually no pence.  We are probably going to go to Rishikesh before we go to Agra.  It's supposed to be at the start of lots of spiritual trails and it has good views of the mountains and the Ganges.  And I could do with more of the peace and relaxation that I've had today, but less of the claustrophobia.

But tomorrow we're just planning to go see a Sikh temple and maybe go to Lodi Gardens.

Another Earth - The best film I've seen in ages, possibly ever

Some films are just films.  You could watch them on a black and white portable running off a car battery and they would still work.  And then some films remind you of everything that's great about going to the cinema.  Every scene is a work of art, and Another Earth is one of those.  Ruth and I went to see it at the Arc in Stockton last night.

The film starts with a car crash which is ironic because we were nearly run over twice trying to get across the road into the Arc.  Somebody called Pam in a Merc tried to run us over in the middle of the green man, but luckily we made it.

When the film started there was one man in front with a squeaky chair who kept moving about, and one lady behind us who seemed to be going for the world record for the noisiest and longest opening of a bar of chocolate in history.  Other than that there was only a transfixed silence in the room.  There was a mild sex scene later on in the film, and the three middle aged men in front of us, felt it necessary to say something to each other during this, to displace their unease, but other than that, not a sound was heard.

In Contact, when Jodie Foster gets wherever she's going, she says they should have sent a poet.  Well, they should have sent one to see Another Earth, because I don't have the words to do it justice.

It's a science fiction story, sort of, but it's not a Hollywood blockbuster.  I can't recall anything at all blowing up.  A mirror image Planet Earth has been found, where there might be another one of each of us.  It was a little bit reminiscent of Moon and Contact, although last night made me regret even more not seeing either of those at the cinema.  As for a cinematic experience it was very close to Once.  There was no hollywoodisation of the central pair of characters.  Failure to Launch it was not.

I've said recently that I don't like films that are like the World Staring Championships, where people just sit around in a room and talk, or don't even talk, they just look out of the window.  This film has cured me in one evening of my need to see stuff blown up by men in orange jumpsuits.  The placing of some fresh flowers in a vase, the leaving of a toy somewhere, the sweeping of a floor or the scrubbing away of graffiti.  All these scenes were just like poetry.

There were parts about sadness and loss and grief, parts about preparing to go on a journey into the unknown, parts about learning to live with disappointment and unfulfilled potential.  All life's lessons were in there. 

Every scene was magical  It's probably one of those films which if I was studying A Levels I would come away from and say how it works on so many levels.  But I'm too old now to know about levels, what I do know about are emotions.  And it pushed just about every emotional button I've got, and it also left me needing some extra buttons for emotions I didn't even know I could have..

The science wasn't really explained, which was just as well, because two Earths that close together would probably cause some lots of cataclysmic weather disruption and people getting their car tyres and arms melted a la The Core but thankfully there wasn't any feebly cobbled together attempt to explain away the science, like in 2012, where the neutrinos were mutating the planet into oblivion.  The science was just left out, and the result was an absolutely gripping human drama.

There are about a hundred separate scenes in the film that you could write a book each about.  The constant shots of the earth and the moon, the silence, the moving voiceovers, the changing decor of a girl's bedroom,  a game of Wii boxing, a house being gradually tidied up, a chance meeting in a shop with a former school mate, a writing competition, families trying to move on from tragedy.  Nothing I could ever say would do it justice.  Ruth and I were awake between 3 and 4 this morning discussing all the things in it that just blew us away.

If you can, go and see it.  It's probably not showing at the cinema, so when it comes out on DVD, buy it.  It won't be as good as at the cinema, but just watch it anyway.

It's another one of those films which are shown at the Arc, which you just wouldn't get to see at the multiplex.  We've already seen Jack goes Boating and Sound it Out there this year which were unforgettable.  We also saw Deep Blue Sea which drove me mad with its miserable central relationships, 50s wallpaper and grating violin music, but I'd sit through that a hundred times if I had to for the chance to see Another Earth again.