Downhill mountain biking

As Queenstown is located at the foot of a small mountain, they had built a gondola and a restaurant at the top. They also figured that people would be crazy enough to throw themselves down the mountain on a bike, and they were right. Actually people would even pay for that, so did we.
The town had a couple of places hiring out bikes, all of them with the best offer of course. We settled on a smaller shop in the side street, where prices were about $30 below street prices that was around $100.
For that amount we got a downhill full suspension bike, helmet, elbow and lower leg protectors. That cost extra the other places too, so all in all a good deal we got.
We had to put down a bond of $2000 for the bike in case something would happen to it, like of we were in a bad crash and broke something. In other words, the credit card that was swiped was our insurance... Nice to know
Joe had been doing some downhill biking in Scotland already, while my biking mostly consisted of canyons in the San Diego area, but I was a least pretty confident on a bike. Nubian had not been on a mountain bike before, but at least he didn't lack courage.
The gondola ticket was on top of the bike rental, $45 for a half day, we were discussing whether to get a full day, but maybe that would be overkill.
Started out the riding on some of the easier trails down, and after around 5 minutes I made a total wipe-out in a corner. From there on I started paying a little more respect. The easy trails were in fact not that easy afterall. Tried some of the more intermediate ones and some of the pro trails where I for sure did not belong.
The intermediate and pro trails were more technical than fun in my opinion, maybe I am just not good enough, who knows, so I spent most of my time on the so called easy trails. Here I could go faster and faster and it got quite exciting sometimes, flying past trees with only a few centimeters to spare on each side of the handle bar and shoulders. Crashing into the tree for sure hurt, but it was so a rush.
Slowly learned to keep some speed through the corners and use the banked corners to go through the turn, but it was still not without some kind of fear.
There were lots of jumps, unfortunately Nubian's skills as a photographer were not something to brag about, so all the pictures he took were either too late, none at all or of something totally different.
At the end of the day, Nubian had been driving a little on the blue and blacks during the day, and wanted to show his skills. He thought he would follow me, but I guess wasn't ready for the speed. He ended up hitting a bump and flying off the bike, landing hands first, scraping a nice size of flesh off his palms on the hands, he was done biking for the day.
A few minutes later I saw Joe was walking with his bike, he had gotten a flat tire and was also done. I decided to quit as well, having built up this strange type of confidence that makes life so much more dangerous. I was getting better for sure and also more daring, which I know from earlier experience, can lead to bad results. I was really fun though and surprisingly hard, all the pedaling energy is eaten away from the rear suspension. But I would not think twice about going again, I would be the first on the mountain!