There’s a container about two meters away, and a meter or two down. I have to jump on to it from a rooftop. The gap between the roof and the container is an easy two meters.

This might not seem like much, but I’m not great with heights, it’s dewy and slick on the container’s rusty surface and I’m wearing ill-suited, slippery skate shoes.

Nasty i mages go through my head, and my heart pounds. I could jump, land, slip, and go down the gap, backwards and headfirst. Not a good way to go. On the other hand, I could somehow miss the gap through sheer unlucky un-coordination and break my legs. Slightly better, but still something I’d rather avoid. Compounding my vertigo is the knowledge that we’re really not supposed to be here. Any accidents will be met with awkward questions, or even trespass and arrests.

I jump anyway. I land, safe, and feel exhilarated. We’re having an adventure in an unloved corner of an unlovely city. It’s urban exploration.

Urban exploration, or Urbex to those in the know or with a taste for abbreviations, is as old as cities themselves, but it’s only recently that a trend for exploring the forgotten or forbidden areas of towns and cities has swept the world. Like other niche trends such as dumpster diving and geohashing, Urbex’s profile has been inflated by the internet and wide media coverage. Its rise has seen groups from cities all over the world forming for the purpose of exploring and documenting the places man built – then forgot.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Urbex is often both illegal and dangerous. Many urban exploration activities involve “infiltration” – accessing a site in a manner that isn’t strictly legal. Given the fact that sites generally belong to others, trespassing is inevitable. Often sites are guarded, and being caught can be a quick ticket to the local police station. Not to mention that abandoned infiltration targets (or active ones like construction sites) are often inherently dangerous.

Urban explorers get around the dubious legality of their operations by, mostly, not being caught, and by leveraging careful anonymity wherever they meet online. Their best protection, though, may be a strict code of ethics, championed by the original urban explorer, the late Jeff Chapman, aka Ninjalicious.

“Genuine urban explorers,” says his website, http://www.infiltration.org, “never vandalize, steal or damage anything — we don't even litter. We're in it for the thrill of discovery and a few nice pictures, and probably have more respect for and appreciation of our cities' hidden spaces than most of the people who think we're naughty. We don't harm the places we explore. We love the places we explore.”

Which brings us to urban exploration in Hamilton. It’s often dubbed a staid, boring or just plain ordinary place. On the surface, it may well be all these things. But there’s a hidden side to Hamilton that has its own inner beauty.

My first time was unplanned, quick, nerve-racking, and completely exhilarating. I’d joined up with a couple of exploration-happy friends for the Balloons over Waikato Nightglow event at Waikato University. We were walking back, having necked a bottle of $5 wine or so between us, and feeling… mischievous.

“Did you know,” said one, who I’ll call Kristov (because codenames are cool,) “that there are tunnels under the University Library?”

I did, because some other friends had slipped into the construction site of the Student Hub (currently the University Library) and discovered many strange things. One hinted that antique maintenance tunnels ran under the entire University, just waiting to be discovered. Sadly, he couldn’t remember where the entrance was.

We decided to have a look for them. Unnoticed by the tens of thousands of people milling around for the Nightglow, we slipped through a loose fence bearing a sign that said “DANGER! CONSTRUCTION SITE! AUTHORISED PERSONELL ONLY!” and wriggled our way under the Library.

It’s true, there are tunnels under the Library. They have full working electric lighting (possibly for the construction workers) complete with doors to nowhere and piles of old junk – we found a money machine and stacks of old lecterns, dusty and forlorn. We slipped through trenches and ducked through caves. It was truly exiting – the childhood buzz of undetected access returned, full-strength. We shouted just to hear the echoes, reasoning that if any security or police heard us we could probably argue our way out of a trespass notice – it’s a rare burglar that draws attention to himself.

We snuck out of the tunnels by a different route, and decided to try some “roofhacking” as the pioneers urban exploration at MIT put it. We found a likely spot and, after some hair-raising climbing, soon found ourselves sitting on the roof of K block.

We had a great view of the University and surrounds. It was a well-lit night, and was oddly quiet after the Nightglow crowds had departed. We sat down and talked about nothing in particular, and I asked Kristov and his friend Natasha what it was that appealed to them about urban exploration.

“Urban Exploring is like backpacking in El Salvador when all your friends are getting drunk in Munich and stoned in Amsterdam. It’s the same thing as hanging out in town, but not as showy and pleasantly grittier,” Natasha said. Kristov agreed.

“Everyone has seen the fronts and bottoms of every building in Hamilton,” he said. “It gets old, fast. It might sound lame, but seeing Victoria St or campus from a rooftop is truly refreshing.

That and it becomes addictive to watch out for new construction sites or a carelessly tossed ladder. It truly becomes a hobby to sit down during the day and plan out where you will climb at night.”

We climbed down from the roof, carefully, and agreed to head out again as soon as possible.

In the break between trips I had the chance to check out what the urban exploration online community had to offer. I was amazed at the diversity of locations various explorers had infiltrated, and the peculiar beauty of the abandoned and otherwise-unnoticed sites they’d been. Many urban explorers are also photographers, and they take great care to document their journeys and try and capture a side of city life few have ever seen. Their forays can often be seen popping up on popular blogsites like BoingBoing.

Closer to home, New Zealand has a surprisingly active online urbex community. I was particularly intrigued by a New Zealand-based website, http://www.slackninja.com. Its members – most of them kiwis – have found hundreds of unlikely areas to explore and documented many trips on the site. It functions as a combined forum and photo gallery, with explorers helping each other with suggestions for finding new spots and infiltrating existing ones.

For our next jaunt, we decided just to walk about Hamilton and explore wherever took our fancy. We started with one of Hamilton’s (only) nice buildings, the Anglican cathedral off Victoria street.

Kristov knows how to get onto the roof here, but we contented ourselves with hanging around the surrounds, discovering nooks and crannies. In an area close to the cathedral, we discovered a kind of industrial carpark with a sagging garage roof that took some careful negotiating – leading to my (sort-of) daredevil jump I described back at the beginning. Kristov and Nastasha negotiated it easily, laughing at me a bit. I still felt proud.

From here we ran up a ramp near a real-estate building, on my suggestion that it might be possible to get onto the roofs of a few Hood Street bars. Happily, it turned out we could. If you’re ever in Diggers back bar, look up at the skylight. You might just see some urban explorers looking back at you.

We sat up here for a while, minding the slippery roof, and enjoying the ambience of being high above the glass-strewn back alleys of Hamilton’s bar district. Music wafted up to us, agreeably. We hung around here for a bit before departing for the Toys R Us building, in the hope that we could get a photo op with the jolly bear mascot on the building’s roof.

We managed to get onto the top of the building, via a handy container (they’re everywhere, it turns out) and we were headed for the bear when a window slid open on one of the adjacent buildings we’d assumed to be industrial and uninhabited. A fat woman in a nightdress screeched at us.

“Excuse me, what are you doing?” she yelled, a pale harpy in the cold night.

We told her the truth – we were exploring, and we were sorry for waking her up. This did not impress her.

“You’re not meant to be here,” she deduced, loudly. “I’m going to call the police.”

We made ourselves scarce, and headed for Wintec, where the old F-block building is being torn down.

Warning signs about asbestos contamination greeted us. Unfortunate ly, asbestos contamination is a major occupational hazard of urban explorers. Many take masks with them while on trips – it’s nasty stuff to get in your lungs.

We didn’t have masks, but we went in anyway. On the gutted lower levels, we found treasure. There was a large wooden model ship in a room filled with graffiti art and wall scribblings. We found a notebook there. A quick flick through revealed it to belong to local Hamilton urban artist, Noodles. If you’re reading this, Noodles, we’ve still got it. Come into the Nexus office to collect it.

We explored dank, dusty corridors, wondering what we were inhaling. We found strange storage rooms with mysterious stains on the walls. Dark staircases and boarded-off doors met us at every turn. It was quite genuinely creepy, in an enticing kind of way. We took photos, and left. This rounded out our night, and, buzzing with the thrill of slightly larcenous entry and seeing what only a few get to see, we left.

There are plenty of other places in Hamilton left for us to explore. Via http://www.slackninja.com and tools like Google Maps, we’ve found out that Hamilton has wonders like deserted rail-yards, industrial wastelands, abandoned factories, and even an underground railway station! We hope, eventually, to explore them all. After all, what better to breath life into the staid city than to make your own fun? Hamilton’s backside is really quite a beautiful beast. You might even care to explore it for yourself.