The next few years of my life were fairly unsettled. I moved around New Zealand, worked a string of different jobs and generally made life up as I went along. Most of my work was in service stations, either behind the counter as a cashier or outside as a forecourt attendant. Back then, that meant actually serving customers at their cars, filling tanks, checking oil and water, cleaning windscreens and doing whatever else needed doing.

Around six months after Mum died, I bought my first road motorcycle, although my obsession with motorcycles had actually started much earlier. I was about eight years old when my grandfather bought me my first motorbike, and from the moment I climbed onto it, I was hooked. There was something about motorcycles that got under my skin and never left. I loved the sound of an engine, the smell of petrol, pulling them apart, fixing them and, most of all, that feeling when you twisted the throttle and took off.

I've owned a motorcycle pretty much ever since. That first road bike opened up a whole new world for me, and motorcycles would go on to become one of the few constants throughout the many different stages of my life. I've owned more than a hundred of them to date. Some people collect stamps; apparently, I collect motorcycles. Judging by the amount of money I've spent on them over the years, stamps probably would have been the smarter option.

By the time I was around twenty, I'd spent time back in Lower Hutt, where I'd lived during parts of my childhood, as well as Napier, where Dad was living at the time. I bounced around a fair bit, usually finding work wherever I landed. Somewhere amongst all that moving around, I started smoking weed, and when I say I started smoking weed, I don't mean the occasional joint at a party. Before long, I was stoned all day, every day.

It became part of my daily routine. I smoked when I woke up, smoked with friends, smoked after work and smoked before bed. Eventually, being stoned stopped feeling like being stoned. It simply became my normal state.

Eventually, I got a job at Autofix in Lower Hutt, working on the forecourt and doing automotive servicing and mechanical work. I loved it. I could finally make some money using the skills I'd learned working on cars. I serviced vehicles, got my hands dirty and spent my days around engines, tools and petrol. I was good with mechanical things, and for once I had work that I genuinely enjoyed.

Outside work, life was becoming one long experiment. Weed was the constant, but I also started trying acid, ecstasy and magic mushrooms. There was no great philosophical reason behind any of it. If something sounded like it might be fun, chances were I was willing to give it a go. At that point, drugs weren't destroying my life. I was working, I had somewhere to live, I had mates and I had motorcycles. As far as I was concerned, everything was going pretty well.

At the time, I was living with a couple of friends in a rented house on High Street in Lower Hutt. It was your fairly typical house full of young blokes, and the standards weren't particularly high. If you could find a clean cup and the toilet still flushed, we were basically running a five-star establishment.

There was one expense, however, that was starting to annoy me. Considering the amount of weed I was smoking, I was spending a fair bit of money on it, so I came up with what I thought was an excellent solution: I'd grow my own.

There was some unused space in the ceiling, and before long I'd turned part of it into my own little horticultural project. Only a few friends knew it was there, and I intended to keep it that way. As far as I was concerned, it made perfect financial sense. Why keep buying weed when I could grow it myself? In my permanently stoned twenty-year-old mind, I was practically an entrepreneur.

One of the friends who knew about my little horticultural venture was Craig. One day, Craig turned up with some interesting information. Apparently, somewhere in the hills around Lower Hutt, there was a patch of cannabis growing, and he suggested we go for a bush walk and see if we could find it.

We didn't know exactly where it was, we didn't know who owned it, and we certainly hadn't given much thought to what might happen if the owner happened to be there when we found it. None of those details seemed particularly important at the time. Going on an adventure through the bush looking for a mysterious crop of weed sounded like a perfectly reasonable way to spend the day.

We drove out to the general area, parked the car and headed into the bush. For the first twenty minutes or so, we wandered around with very little idea what we were doing. We didn't have a map, coordinates or any real directions. We were basically two stoners walking through the New Zealand bush hoping we'd somehow stumble across a cannabis plantation.

Then I smelled something familiar.

I stopped, and Craig noticed it too. We knew that smell, so we started following our noses through the bush. The further we walked, the stronger it became, until eventually we found what we'd been looking for.

There it was: the holy grail.

Hidden amongst the bush were big, healthy cannabis plants absolutely loaded with bud. For two young blokes who smoked weed from morning until night, it was a magnificent sight. For a moment, we simply stood there admiring what we'd found.

There was, of course, one fairly significant problem. None of it belonged to us.

That probably should have been the point where we turned around, walked back to the car and congratulated ourselves on successfully finding it. Instead, common sense completely left the building, and we started pulling plants and stuffing as much as we could into our bags.

We had no idea who owned the crop, and at that particular moment we didn't really care. We were probably too busy congratulating ourselves on our incredible good fortune to consider why somebody had gone to so much trouble to hide a large cannabis crop in the middle of the bush.

Then a voice came roaring through the trees.

"I'm going to fu#king kxll you!"

Everything stopped.

We turned around and saw a patched Mongrel Mob member charging towards us through the bush. I think I literally sh@t myself. There are moments in life when you instantly realise you've made a poor decision, and this was definitely one of them.

Whatever bravery Craig and I had possessed a few seconds earlier disappeared immediately. We knew enough to understand that being caught stealing someone's cannabis crop was probably not going to end with a polite request to put the plants back.

We grabbed our bags and ran for our lives.

There was no convenient pathway back to the car, so we simply smashed our way through whatever was in front of us. Branches, scrub, mud and wild gorse bushes became part of the escape route. The gorse ripped into my arms and legs like thousands of needles as I stumbled, fell over, got back up and kept running, all while desperately trying to hold onto a bag full of stolen weed.

In hindsight, dropping the bloody bag might have been the sensible thing to do. Apparently, however, there are limits to common sense, even when you're being chased through the bush by a very angry gang member.

I could still hear yelling somewhere behind us, which was all the encouragement I needed to keep moving. Every time I stumbled, I expected to feel someone grab the back of my shirt. My heart was pounding, my arms and legs were being shredded by the gorse, and suddenly our brilliant afternoon adventure didn't seem quite so brilliant anymore.

Then, through the scrub in the distance, I saw something beautiful: the roof of my car.

I've never been particularly athletic, but I reckon I could have qualified for the Olympics that day. Craig and I tore through the last of the bush, reached the car, threw ourselves inside and took off as quickly as we could.

As we sped away, I looked into the rear-view mirror and saw one seriously peed-off Mongrel Mob member standing behind us, shaking his fists and screaming threats in our direction. My heart was still hammering, but we'd made it.

Somehow, Craig and I had gone into the hills looking for a rumoured crop of weed, actually found it, stolen as much as we could carry, been chased through the bush by a patched gang member and escaped with both the weed and all our limbs still attached. At around twenty years old, that probably qualified as a successful afternoon.

We thought we'd gotten away with it, but we hadn't.

There was a price to pay for i had done, and it was coming my way.