When Shanti Mathias first moved to Wellington, biking through the city seemed terrifying. But she soon realised that two wheels let her explore the city on her own terms.

In my first year of university, I fulfilled one trope perfectly: the person who has moved from a small town to a big city, and is always getting lost, nervous of traffic. Wellington was a jumble of grey streets, meeting at odd angles. Buses squeezed past office buildings, cars zoomed past on the quays and when it rained, water sprayed behind wheels.

I knew this, of course, because I was biking everywhere: to parties at my friend’s flat, to the library, to cafes, to university, to my job nannying. I had left home with a lesson from my dad about repairing punctures and a pink mountain bike I took up and down the city’s hills for the next four years.

While I had known how to ride a bike since I was a child, biking was an occasional fun activity – a complicated game of tag on wheels in the holidays, or riding to a restaurant for lunch on a weekend. Now I was 18, and biking was transport. I didn’t have much money: if I needed to get somewhere, I rode there. I kept a bike lock in my backpack, so the bike would stay safe while I was at university or staying the night at my friend’s place.

Without experience riding on busy roads, it often seemed scary to be so close to the traffic. I wasn’t in the habit of signalling my turns or wearing hi-vis clothing. But an advantage of being 18 is being determined. As the days got shorter and rainier I bought some lights for my bike, so I could be seen on the road when biking home after parties. In time, the movement of looking behind me to check for cars while riding became less awkward, and more automatic.

For the first few months living in Wellington, I returned from each ride through the city wishing to never ride a bike again. Sometimes I would walk 45 minutes to get somewhere or take the bus if it was pouring. The pink bike sat there, waiting patiently. Soon enough, I would be late for class and find myself clipping my helmet on, packing a raincoat just in case, and pedalling out of the garage.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when cycling stopped being a necessary evil and became a pleasure. One day, riding to pick up the kids I babysat in Island Bay, I reached the top of the hill and saw the sparkling ocean beyond. Did the descent feel like soaring? It did. A month or two later, I biked back from a friend’s house in Newtown, evening settling over the city. It was a weekend, and the road was nearly empty. As lights switched on, I saw another side of the city, and felt quietness settle inside myself, while my legs kept moving.

Did riding a bike get easier, or did I get used to it? A bit of both, I suppose. Today, it seems inevitable that between us, my husband and I now have six bikes in the garage. But six bikes don’t happen overnight. It was a sense of discovery that propelled me, the way two wheels allowed me to explore on my own terms.

For me, the bike was a way to experience the best part of the city, to notice things I’d never have seen from a car or a bus. When I moved to Auckland after university, I relished the warm wind on my skin while spinning down the bike pathway, and enjoyed the sense of inner heat from pedalling on cool winter days. The bike made the city bigger, but also more interesting; it’s easy to stop when you see something you want to check out.

When I scroll through photos on my phone, I see the evidence of all these bike-enabled neighbourhood noticings. The angle of the sun over Auckland volcanoes; I stopped and looked on my ride home from a music lesson, although the camera doesn’t capture the warmth of the golden sunshine. My bike leaning against my body in the queue for the Waiheke ferry, a ticket to explore the island at my own pace, hair salty from swimming. A selfie with a blossom tree I braked to a stop underneath, my head against a galaxy of petals.

There’s something about the control a bike offers, the sense of leaning my weight into a corner, the instant responsiveness when I squeeze the brakes. It feels something like self-sufficiency. It helps that bikes are easy to fix with simple tools, although I had to work my way up to confidence adjusting brakes and checking chains. I have a photo of this, too, a beaming shadowy picture of the moment I finished changing an inner tube, done late at night with a head torch so I could ride the next day. I sent it to my dad.

Our extra bikes are good for guests. Last year, my friend Danielle came to visit, and I adjusted one of the mountain bikes to fit her height. We attached our bike lights, signalled left onto the bike lane and went to dinner. “You run into all the best people in the bike lane,” I joke. There is an unplanned symmetry to slowing so I can talk to my friend Rob waiting by the lights, or waving at my cousin biking the other direction on his way back from uni.

Biking feels like the key to unlocking a hundred tiny intimacies of where you live, reshaping your attention. A slight downhill I’d ignore when driving becomes a speed boost; an ignored driveway between two houses turns out to be a bike-sized path and a perfect shortcut. On my ride home through a park last week, I noticed a tree dropping apples and picked several up to tuck into my panniers.

When riding in traffic, I am tugged into alertness, listening to and looking at my surroundings. But when I get home, I no longer feel like I’ve survived a harrowing experience. When I was 18, I knew I’d have to bike because it was the only option. Now, I know I’ll choose my bike again and again. It’s my favourite way to move in the city.