In a shit three-part series, Beng Kidney examines the subtle nuances of a trio of rude boys visiting Wairoa Gorge.

I’d started to forget the association between mountain biking and fun when Lindup whispered to me with his wet mouth while stroking his exposed and furry paunch that he was going to an open day at the gorge. He said I had to come too because it was his 30^th birthday and he was sick of me not doing anything but bob around in the sea in my free time. It was Tom’s special personal weekend as well, amongst a wider crop of other ne’er-do-wells that had sprouted up after a spate of 1980s late-August cold-weather diddlings failed to keep the twin juices of life separate or out of the toilet. Now those buds had blossomed into flat peak-wearing, banger-taking, twelve dollar beer-swilling dirt boys. Nature is devastatingly beautiful.

After gathering some high-powered birthday liquor, we packed Tom’s wagon and smooched his sweet carry-pupper, got some high liquid kebabs and drove into the guts of the ferry queue to squirt their sauces onto our laps. Linduppy would be joining us a day later as a result of his inability to be in built-up areas for too long without a minder.

A pair of sensible German lovers ran their van flat at a critical moment so we gave them a little push. They were grateful to meet such a helpful pair of boy-elves on their Middle Earth extravaganza. We disconnected from rock and dirt and cable and cocooned ourselves in steel plate and diesel oil against the rushing waters pouring across the strait, the oceanic desert where the tides meet asynchronously and the currents suck the life from the brine. I did some Tindering while Tom discreetly suckled at a fancy beer he’d tucked under his wing, wearing the mute expression of a man in the act of something formally forbidden but cosmically insignificant.

The ferry was largely empty with the exception of a gaggle of early twenties media personnel who were on some variety of assignment and reeked of hyper self-consciousness. They spoke about the novelty of adult work and responsibility and its surrealism, their child identity still holding, how do you even adult, hum a blank tone of awareness with an eye-dipping apology always ready. Seventeen years of continuous, formalised, state-sponsored preparation and you get let loose on writing an article for a toe-the-line editor to whittle down to platitudes. The ferry heralds a beginning to their South Island Instagram adventure that will see them sleeping in a tent on a mown lawn and apologising post-coitally. The world turns and Tom wakes up, burping.

Disorientated when we’re spat out in Picton, we drove down the wrong exit lane. It ends in a locked gate, but Tom snakes through a gap in the barriers before the point of no return. We looked behind us as the stream of cars that were on our tail started to back up at the unattended gate and cackled. It’s what you get for trusting your fellow man, especially when your fellow men are tossers.

Blowing south with the breeze. Whites Bay opened out into faint lights across the rippled sea. The night sky had hollow depth, stitch-worked light filled in with yawning expanses of bone-breakingly cold vacuum, seared by radiation. We lay under the gaseous cushion and Tom’s air mattress deflated beneath him. He got a sheet of plywood from the car and lay on it; giggling at the latent implication of internet outdoorsmen that time spent in nature is synonymous with nobility.

We woke up soggy and hopped around in our undies to find good places to do wees without children seeing the terrible truths of our genitals. There wasn’t any coffee in the boot, so Tom stuffed some borrowed teabags in the bottom of a stovetop espresso which quickly boiled over and wet the stove. We sipped 50mls of concentrated tea each and licked some peanut butter off a spoon.

It was going to be a physical day, Mount Robertson was over a thousand metres high and the climb was minimally rideable, as had been the case with most of our rides lately. Three to four hours of overcooked cabbage with about 20 minutes of steamed pudding; for whatever reason the pud sticks better to the brain cheeks.

Tom “Split Infinitive” Lynskey takes in an #nznofilter moment

We started pedalling and the gravel track flexed up through the pines towards the bay road as it crested the spur. The sun was fingering through the needles and pinching the sweat out of me already. Once we crossed the tarmac we were onto a rutted vehicle track with a temple-throbbing gradient, reticulating the spur as the main ridge peeked out from beside the sun. The landscape dimensions felt off about the centre, the hillsides were so steep and the gorge was so tight that the smooth face of the globe was imbalanced around the terrible gradient. Tom spun away and I started pushing; and so that theme continued for the next three hours, entering a knotted beech forest that felt damp in the eternal sense and had the background smell of steadily fermenting feet. The greased clay that concaved between the spiderwebs of blackslicked beech root looked tasty for when we decided to shake off the gravitational potential we were harvesting.

We got to the track intersection in fair time and looked towards the radar dome, it didn’t look too far. But, like it inevitably is, it was, and after another hour of steadily less-enthusiastic pushing we sat down beside the humming dome and looked out at the vista of trees that had grown in the way of the view. We resigned ourselves to a nut bar each and a couple of farts.

The first stretch of descent was a party mixture; it started with crackling and spitting shale beds, then entered flowing, greasy-leafed double track with rooty, technical shortcuts and straightlines with small drops and chutes. It wound into undulations towards the track intersection and we took a breather before the beech forest proper, where the NZ Enduro runs a leg. Tom turned on the oppressive red eye of a GoPro behind me and I felt the heavy burden of Facebook analysis before stopping and letting him past. The track was some tasty beans; the slippery chutes we’d waddled up earlier blew by seamlessly, rear tyres slithering into catch pockets, popping over root nests. We hit the vehicle track and found the shaped and moulded pirate track to the road, then skipped over the road without thinking and had to tripod down a long, greasy poostain of a freeride trail deep into the wrong bay. Another half hour of pushing (and some quiet reflections on life) later we got back on the descent to Whites. I got into the sea and some scraggle-bearded Yankee liberals looked on as I washed my diddle and danced around the angry crabs snipping at my tiddlers.

We hermetically sealed the stinkiest gear and squeezed into the wagon. The sun had been eclipsed by the vacuum of the valley as we plubbed over the ridge into limp-wristed wine country.

Somewhere out there, Duppy was waiting.