done on big machines , but had come to answer the ‘ call of the wild ’. There was a wide range of bikes , from the indestructible Royal Enfield Himalayan to the tech-laden Tiger Rally Pro ( a little like parking the Flintstones ’ family wagon next to the Starship Enterprise ), but all of the bikes were capable of more than their riders could squeeze out of them .
THE THEORY So , first things first - some theory . Theory can quickly evaporate in the heat of battle , but at the same time it ’ s worthwhile getting some mantras under your belt before you leave the house . You know the sort of thing ... pants first then shoes . A big one for me was the Joel Smets approach of getting the weight off the back wheel - treating the front end like a little car towing a big trailer . This is based on the notion that the front is the boss and the rest of the bike is an employee which should do what it ’ s told with the right amount of firm encouragement . Stand up and you ’ re leaning right forward , almost looking down over the front wheel . Some more talk of body positioning - counter balance vs counter steer or leaning against the turn . Weighting the pegs to commit more to the turn and lastly ‘ looking long , planning long ’; when you ’ re doing this , you ’ re ready for that . It might sound like common sense , but my own tendency to become myopic in tricky conditions is probably the one habit I needed to break .
THE PRACTICE Anyway enough talk , on to some riding . We saddled up and rode the short haul to Cable Bay Adventure Park , north-east of Nelson . The park has a fenced-off paddock set up for quad bike tours . I ’ m not sure if anyone around the country has set up an adventure riding training park , but this would just about be the template . A mix of the rutty and rocky , open grassy areas and a big hilly face . A few table tops which would be the answer if the question was how do you get a Royal Enfield airborne . The first exercises were manoeuvring around figure eights - keep up the revs , feather the
Ever decreasing circles : Instructor Jason keeps a watchful eye on a Tiger 900 rider doing low speed figure 8s
clutch , use the back brake and look where you want to go . Sounds simple . Then a bit of a loose loop to practice the counter-balancing and weighting the pegs , and a tighter slalom to piece all of those bits together and get acquainted with the steering lock . If I ’ m honest hitting the lock is something I only fleetingly managed , but it feels like getting comfortable with it would be a worthwhile investment . Dropping the bike wasn ’ t something anyone planned , but low-speed low-sides aren ’ t quite so onerous when the landing is soft and there ’ s a ready crew to help get it upright . Just pride at stake and no one was judging . Watching others make mistakes can be a powerful learning tool . After some decent repetition getting comfortable stringing those techniques together , it was splitting up into three groups for three stations - hill recovery , hard braking in the rough , and mud . One hitch was that the mud was mostly sunbaked into hard ruts . Slightly greasy , but not
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