J.R. Manawa's Blog, page 4

You can’t handle your lingering human emotions

Chapter 8, in which the plot thickens…..

Do you have a fetish for being vomited on, or something?

I’m going to have a mad rush through Christmas to get this story done now, thanks to a lost few days. Oh, and if you are just joining the tale, start here! But here we go, next chapter, and this one is for all of us who’ve ever wished for our very own Mr Darcy, Edmond Dantes, Jay Gatsby, Romeo Montague, or perhaps, more recently, it’s an Edward Cullen, Christian Grey sort that you’re hoping for. A Prince Charming who can barely keep his demons locked in the closet, and of course, discovers you are the perfect fit to help him fight them. If you are a guy, Nadine is that girl you are going to have to chase. That girl you want to impress, and you can’t even fully explain to yourself why…

An Undead Christmas Carol. J R Manawa.

Do you have a fetish for being vomited on, or something?

…

It was a good few minutes before Nadine sensed someone behind her, and only a moment after that a chilled hand grasped her own, pulling her back and spinning her around.

“You move pretty quick too, you know.” He laughed. His composure was completely unaffected by the wind, the cold, and the fact he’d clearly run after her. He’d brought no coat with him, no scarf, nothing.

She looked down at his hand holding her own. She didn’t know whether to snatch her hand back on principle or allow it because he was unreasonably attractive. She closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to remove his face from her chain of thought.

When she opened her eyes, he was still there of course, watching her with a cocky smile as the flurries of snow twisted and tumbled about them.

“So what?” she retorted, like a five year old. Her childish reply made her blush again.

Completely unprovoked, or so she believed, he took her chin in his free hand and pulled her in toward him very suddenly and kissed her once, slowly.

“So warm,” he whispered, an amused frown rippling across his face as he drifted his hand over her blushing cheek, catching snowflakes and then watching them melt against her face.

She bit her lip and pulled back from him. “Look, I don’t know what happened last night, but I am not that cheap,” she told him, her eyes flashing angrily.

He let go of her hand and grinned, “You really are a fighter, aren’t you?”

“When a man I don’t know chases me down the street and kisses me, yes. Yes I am.” She folded her arms and leaned back from him, her expression demanding and explanation.

“My sincerest apologies,” he straightened up and bowed his head to her in polite mockery. “We haven’t been introduced. My name is Caleb Adams.”

Nadine’s expression and body language did not change.

“Still offended?” he asked.

“You kissed me,” she exclaimed, “you blatantly invaded my personal space and kissed me! Who does that?!” she put her hands up in frustration.

“It seemed a good ice breaker at the time,” Caleb admitted.

“Look, I don’t care how good looking you are, you don’t go kiss a girl before you’ve even introduced yourself.”

Caleb’s smile only grew. “I just thought if we’d gotten to the stage where you were comfortable vomiting over me, then a kiss was probably miles within the boundaries of our interaction.”

“I what?!” Nadine squeaked.

Caleb laughed.

Nadine blushed even more, “I, I’m so sorry,” she stammered, “I don’t normally drink that much, it was a bad night for me, I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t worry, it’s really my shirt you needed to apologise to.”

Her mind flashed to the Bentley, and the penthouse, “Oh God, it wasn’t expensive was it?”

Caleb shook his head, “It doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll pay for it.”

He laughed, “That won’t be necessary, really,” then he stopped suddenly. “Actually Nadine, there is something you could do for me.”

Nadine blinked twice. It unnerved her a little the way he used her name. It unnerved her because she liked it. “What?” she asked quickly, none too politely.

“I have an interesting family,” he confessed, as he began to weave his careful lie, “My younger brother and I are all that live in London, the rest are spread across most of Europe, and I will confess I detest keeping in contact with the vast majority. However we have a tradition to meet for a Christmas party on the 21st of December every year, at my uncle’s house in Paris.”

“I don’t follow you,” Nadine frowned, confused.

“Well, this is where you could help me.” He smiled, and his eyes locked onto hers as he said, “This year I find myself in the unique position of requiring a date.”

“Unique position?” Nadine scoffed, and then she added, “Wait, are you asking me?”

He did not reply, he just stared.

“You are asking me out on a date to your family Christmas party in Paris?”

He nodded.

She shook her head at him, her mouth open just a little in wonder, “I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure I understand you.” Unable to help herself, her tendency toward sarcasm kicked in, “So you barely know me, I vomit all over you in some trashy club, to which end you suddenly decide that I’m the girl to take to meet your family at a Christmas party in Paris?”

“Well, it’s more of a ball than a Christmas party,” he admitted, quite honestly, and then he let out another devilish grin as he watched the confusion and disbelief dance over her face. This was definitely fun.

“Do you have a fetish for being vomited on, or something?” she asked, knowing it was probably a vastly inappropriate and lewd suggestion.

Caleb Adams managed to contain his laughter and straighten his face for a moment. He was already getting far more entertainment out of this than he’d planned. “Of course not. This is purely a matter of desperation. You don’t know my family; I have to take a partner to this ball. It’s one of those formal events, invitation to ‘Mr Caleb Adams and partner’, if you know what I mean.” He paused and sighed, “I could pay for a date of course, but it would be far nicer to be in the company of someone who isn’t paid to be there, and isn’t fake.” He watched her expressions carefully, observing her silence before he added, “And I thought, seeing as we have already built some sort of rapport, that it might be something you would consider doing for me?”

Her face softened, just a little. She took a deep breath and searched his pale grey eyes to see if she could read any further answers there. But his eyes were clear and his gaze hard, too hard to read. He was waiting for an answer.

“Well, you did rescue me. I suppose there is a debt owed there.” Who was she to question how families interacted anyway? Especially if hers was anything to go by… “I’ll consider it, on one condition.”

“And what is that?” he asked with curiosity.

“That you promise not to kiss me again,”

“Why would I promise that?”

“Because any unsolicited kissing will seriously encourage me slapping you, and I really won’t be bothered who it’s in front of.”

He let out what she now knew to be one of his naughtiest grins, “I might like that.”

“You might not too.”

Silence fell between them, and Nadine shivered as the wind began to blow again. They had been standing in the street for some time now.

“Are you not cold?” she asked suddenly. It was only now, now that she made this seemingly harmless comment, that she glimpsed a failure in his smooth facade.

He blinked, twice. “Yes of course I am.”

“Well don’t let me keep you, you’ve only a shirt on, and I’ve got a friend waiting for me.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of Regent Street. “You ought to get inside and get warm.” She took a casual step backward, as she stepped she noticed the flickering thought across his eyes, again. “I’ll let you know about Friday,” she said.

“Well, you have four days to consider.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Our train will leave from St. Pancras at 3.30pm.”

“On the 21st?”

“Of course.”

“You are assuming I have a passport, you know.”

“I know you have a passport. You left your ID in my car, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” Nadine blushed. She adjusted her handbag awkwardly before she said, “Well, goodnight then.”

“Goodnight Nadine,” he replied, as she turned away.

She only walked a few steps before she turned back, “Am I going to need a ball gown?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Right,” she sighed, nodded once, and kept walking.

And thanks for the ride home…

Okay, I was out for a few days, best intentions and all that…but there was just sooo much to do. I got to work with an awesome team of stage managers at Wembley to pull this off;

Which was amazing

Discreet Luxury, comfort, and transport satisfaction

Okay I missed a day….yesterday was pretty busy getting ready for Carols at Wembley

I told you, I’m not a goth.

When you meet someone, and they put you in a box….

A tick in all the boxes

Chapter three of our tale, in which we deal with the “meet cute”, except it wasn’t that cute…..

An Undead Christmas Carol. J R Manawa.
A tick in all the boxes.

…

After the birthday boy had been laid to rest in his perfect white coffin with the silver handles and dark blue satin interior, Caleb locked the door of the safe room with his passcode and returned to the living room to set about the task at hand. Disposing of three adult bodies.

As he went to the kitchen and picked out of the top drawer possibly the only useful kitchen item in a house inhabited by vampires – heavy duty, extra-large, black bin bags – he fell into thinking.

About the girl. Nadine.

That she was just the latest victim in a long history of similar cases was a true statement. Levi had mentioned this rather scathingly last night during one of their disagreements. He liked Levi analysing his habits even less than when he did it himself.

As an afterthought, he grabbed the meat-cleaver too.

He’d always fed after a preference when he could, on trend with his mood and hatreds at the time. Whores waiting for death, business men dying for their next dollar, young boys running from home, priests praying to a god they didn’t believe in, musicians high on cocaine, under-fed girls desperate to be actresses.

From the utility cupboard he took a brand new tarpaulin sheet off the stack he kept there.

Eventually he would get bored, or some small interaction would change his tastes, but in the past few years he had found a newgenre to feed on. Levi told him his problem was a masochistic desire for revenge on a world that had made him the monster he was. Caleb disagreed that he had a problem at all, the monster he was had simply given him new pleasures to enjoy, new things to find entertainment in.

With all the films and television programs, brand franchises, books and comics, the world was saturated and changing, more ‘aware’ of things that moved in the dark than ever before, and at the same time – less believing.

He’d forgotten the duct tape. Duct tape holds together all manner of sins. It was also in the utility cupboard.

There were benefits to this disbelief. Blending in had become much easier. Milky-pale skin was just as favourable once more as the sun-kissed brown kind. Black eyeliner was socially acceptable on both sexes, and long black hair and a leather trench coat were a statement in cool. Even fangs had become something of an accessory, and not just for Halloween.

But the gothic and vamperic sub-culture of the twenty-first century had given Caleb a new taste, the ‘sympathetic’ he liked to call them. The depressed and outcast of popular culture, the kind that haunted the clubs and bars around Soho and Camden on Friday nights, or in Brixton after a show at the Academy.

Levi had told him his habits of hunting were disgusting, but said little more on the subject. Levi drank much less often than Caleb, and always went out on his own, a predator hunting another kind of predator, the kind that only a lone child can be found by after dark on a quiet city street. Unfortunately it made him more – righteous – about his feeding.

There was nothing righteous about a meat-cleaver stuck in a femur. Nor was there any salvation in the curious splintering sound when it finally came loose from bone.

It was all rather annoying. Caleb enjoyed his hunting and his easy meals. It was fun to have a girl so obsessed with him that he would be freely offered a smooth, pale neck for that first innocent feed. A little of his own blood in return would keep her alive for a time. They were all begging to be turned anyway. They took the bait happily, overjoyed with thoughts of becoming immortal, living forever.

It was at this point Caleb lost interest. The game was over. How could they really want this? How could they truly say they had considered carefully what they asked for, what they begged for? Living forever was a fate worse than hell or oblivion. Half-changed, and half-dead, he eventually put them out of their misery.

It was just a sick game, but he liked it. How long before they changed their minds? How long before they realised that life was precious? How long before they just gave up? Perhaps it was true that he only did it because of his hatred at what he was. Or perhaps it was purely his disgust that a living human would beg to be like him and would actually choose a damned life for eternity over the sweet warmth of a human existence that ended when the body faded, and the soul moved on.

Caleb had not been given that choice. His soul was bound in damnation on earth to his eternal body.

These girls, however, were now free. And for a moment that thought made him thoroughly sick, as he twisted the duct tape around the third bundle of bin bags and tarpaulin. Who was he to choose their freedom?

Fuck it. Survival of the fittest.

His latest victim, Nadine, had seemed a tick in all the boxes. He’d found her in a bar in Soho, dressed in a black leather mini skirt, patent Dr. Martens boots, and a fishnet top that fell of her shoulders and exhibited the defined curve of her waist beneath it. The waves of her auburn hair had shone an electric red under the black lights, spilling over her shoulders and down her back as she danced.

She was beautiful, without a doubt, but Caleb could read from her eyes, caked as they were in black liner and mascara, that she did not believe she was.

It was perfect hunting.

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Tagged: all the vampire boys you ever had a crush on, blood, blood sucker, bored of tags now, but not really, definitely not really, Edward Cullen, fan fiction, fantasy, gore romance, goth, gothgirl, gothic, horror, interview with a vampire, kardashian vampires, lestat, romance, short stories, short story, sort of, Storyteller, thriller, twilight, vampire, vampire diaries, vampire fiction, vampire romance, vampires

Brothers in life, brothers in death

Because every good vampire has a shadow-filled past, and an undead companion, whom they must both hate and love. Life after death is complex.

An Undead Christmas Carol. J R Manawa.

Brothers in life, brothers in death.

…

“Did you hear me when I suggested that you ought to go after her?” Levi asked again. When Caleb still did not respond, Levi crossed the room to where he stood staring out the window.

Caleb looked down at Levi and grinned ruefully. The two were brothers, in life and in death.

Levi was a good head shorter than him, he’d been only eleven when he was turned. Much too young, though now it was over three hundred years since their merchant father had unwittingly fallen foul of a trade deal with a vampire coven. The coven master had come to claim payment, and the brothers were blessed, or cursed, depending on how you looked at it, to have been desireable then in life, much as they were now in death.

For their beauty, they had been turned.

Both brothers had the family trait of a well-defined jaw which led to a straight chin and a face set with eyes that were narrow, heavily browed, and intense. There the similarities ended, Caleb had been twenty-three the night he died, and though he was of average height, he was slim and his physique well cut. Thanks to his youthful confidence and amber eyes, shadowed with messy locks of warm brown hair, seduction had been a game he’d long enjoyed, and the coven master was no less enthralled by him than any of his female dalliences had been in life.

Levi, so young and angelic with his ash blond hair and distrusting hazel eyes, had been of less interest or use to the coven. Caleb looked back to the view out the window and sighed. So many centuries ago, Caleb had pleaded for his life. Even as his Levi lay dying in his arms he had begged the coven master not to end it. He would have given everything in the world, his last drop of blood, his flesh, everything to save his baby brother.

In hindsight, if he had known then what he knew now, he would have given more, even his very soul he would have sacrificed, in order to allow his brother the peace of death.

Beauty is a both a gift and a curse. A gift that their maker took pity on Caleb’s pleas, and turned both brothers.

A curse, that despite more than three hundred years of existence, Levi was still the child he had been when he was turned, and a child in mind he would forever remain. He gained knowledge and understanding, but his development flat-lined the moment his heart did.

“Have you enjoyed your birthday, brother?” Caleb asked, changing subject.

Levi glared at his brother, his hazel eyes glowing with the quick anger of a predator.

Caleb laughed at him. “You are welcome,” he said, replying to the glare as if it had been a heart-felt thank-you. He chucked Levi’s chin teasingly. “You have no idea how long it took me to find and seduce them all for you.”

Levi’s animal-like glare melted into a frown as Caleb knelt down to embrace him. When he stood back up, the vampire child’s arms were wrapped around his waist in a sudden, rare moment affection. Caleb stroked his fingers through the smooth ash curls that crowned his head, and then rested his arms on Levi’s shoulders.

These moments were few and far between. Caleb knew that Levi was drunk, having taken much more than his fill of blood, the boy vampire would soon be lulled into a heavy sleep, too tired and full to be bothered with any other activities for tonight.

As Caleb waited for sleep to find his brother he stared out the window at the snow dancing down over the rooftops of the city. He could see the lights of the London Eye from here, just peeking up over Whitehall, flashing a deep purple tonight. Across from it he could see the face of Big Ben, to his keen eyes clearly displaying the time, five minutes to twelve. Closer, he could see the glow of the lights and the hum of the traffic coming up through Trafalgar Square and Haymarket to Piccadilly Circus. An hour from now, all of Piccadilly and Leicester Square would fill with clubbers, who would leak through into the narrow roads and claustrophobic venues of Soho and Covent Garden, his favourite hunting grounds.

Caleb loved this time of year, if a vampire can love anything. He smirked, and corrected himself. Caleb was intensely fond of London at this time of year. The night felt endless. The sun went down as early as four, and sometimes it never rose in the morning for the fog and gloom that hung over the city.

Levi would not know half of that beautiful night, however. He was already dozing off, his head lolled against Caleb’s chest. It seemed amusing now, in this tiny moment, that it had taken the brothers three centuries to live in peace.

Where Levi had first clung to Caleb for fear and terror of the monster he had become, he soon began to hate him for it. When the boy vampire reached his twenty-first birthday, eleven years of sunlight and ten in darkness, he turned on his coven and the vampire who had created him. Willing death too for himself and his older brother, he had exposed the coven’s existence to the people of the village they lived in, and the people had in turn exposed the vampires to the burning sunrise.

Where Levi was passionate and quick to anger, Caleb was observant, cold, and slow to boil – long watchful of Levi’s anger and wary of his brother’s fascination with oblivion. He had saved them both, but there the kinship ended, each consumed by their own anger, they went separate ways.

Centuries passed and their paths crossed many times with many terrible consequences. It had only been now, in the last twelve years that the brothers had learned to live in a harmony, of sorts. But it was still tender, Levi had always hated and loved Caleb, and Caleb had always loved and regretted him in return.

A bitterly cold Christmas Eve in New York had set the stage for a chance reunion between the brothers. At the time Caleb had not seen Levi in over a hundred years, but a well-dressed child walking out in the driving snow alone through Central Park on Christmas Eve is of course something to glance twice at, and it only took Caleb half a glance to recognise his brother, a glance that was returned.

So far, they had never looked back. They naturally fought and disagreed over many things, but time was a great healer, and as Caleb hugged the sleeping vampire child against him, he was thankful for it.

He scooped Levi up with both arms and turned carefully, side-stepping around the coffee table and over the outstretched arm of the body Levi had discarded earlier. He sighed, already regretting his extravagant birthday present. There was a long standing rule; never bring food in the house, but tonight for Levi’s three-hundred-and-seventeenth birthday, Caleb had decided in a rash and flippant mood that some rules could be broken.

Because life was boring when lived within the pages of a rule book.

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Tagged: Christmas, dark fairytales, Edward Cullen, fan fiction, fanfic, goth, I should use the same tags, jokes, London, New York, short story, twilight, vampire, vampire boy, vampire diaries, vampire fan fiction, vampire fiction, vampire romance

An Undead Christmas Carol

Hey London! I’m back! What a headlong collision into Christmas madness, and snow!!!!

Apologies in advance, for two reasons. One, December is going to be a cascade of posts and liveliness. Videos, travel blogs and stories. And it’s been far too long since I annoyed the hell out of all of you with a regular story that I actually completed. We had Emmeline in January 2015, and Charis in the middle of the year, whom I’m embarrassed to admit is still lost in the midst of her story. She’ll get there one day. Then there was Starlit Fey and George, both of whom are longing to tell you what happened (they’ll get around to it), and Jenny, who often appears with the full moon.

Here, just for Christmas, you’re going to permit me to be UTTERLY indulgent, unoriginal and generally a bit basic, and I’m going to bring you the height of teenage vampire romance trash. It will be more brutal than twilight, I promise, but I also promise it will be thorough vampire fan girl trash.

Because I can. Because I completely, utterly, talentlessly, can.

Jokes about the talentless. I’m a whizz at cooking up vampire trash, I just don’t usually share it cause, well, twilight, vampire dairies and the quest to be original and all that……

Oh, and we’ll give it an M rating because of the opening bad word and the occasional bit of gore.

An Undead Christmas Carol. J R Manawa.
Are you full, brother?

…

“Fuck you!” she screamed. And the door slammed, rattling on his hinges almost to the point of detachment. Almost.

The vampire stood a few feet back from the door, and stared. In his mind, an age had already passed since the door hit the frame, he’d watched the screws in the hinges until they ceased their panicked vibrations, and watched the shadows play under the door as the she walked away. He’d listened to the stroke of his own handkerchief across her neck as she wiped her blood away, smelt the soft tang as it began to coagulate in the tiny punctures, and then the ‘ding’ of the arriving elevator, the grind of the metal doors, and the spinning and coiling whirr of the rope as the car descended toward the ground floor, some ten stories below.

“She’s getting strong,” a mildly interested voice commented from the far side of the room.

Still the vampire didn’t move. He stared at the door, into the dust and fibres on it’s varnished surface, the joins and knots in the wood, and the cracks where the lacquer showed it’s age.

“You should go after her,” the voice from the corner suggested again. The voice was male, but fairly high – young – and there was an enthralling sweetness to the pitch of it.

“She’ll be back,” the vampire finally stirred, crossing his arms over his chest and turning his head slightly in the direction of the voice.

Out of the shadows in the corner, a boy rose from his chair, dropping to his side the body of a black-haired, slim, pale woman. Pale as her corpse was cold and dry of blood, just like the two others who lay on the floor beside her, and her beauty had left with her soul. The boy grimaced as he took a last look at her and stepped away.

“Are you full, brother?” the vampire asked the child.

The boy smiled, “Enough for tonight.”

The elevator opened on the ground floor. The girl swallowed her tears and stepped out. She didn’t care if the CCTV in the elevator saw her cry, but she did care if the man at the desk did. She flushed with embarrassment.

How was he to know they were angry tears? For all he saw, Mr Adams – CalebAdams – of the west-facing penthouse on the tenth floor, was simply clearing out the trash from the night before. A common occurrence.

If she’d asked for a car, she would have received one, taking her all the way home to South East London in only a short drive. But she didn’t want charity, and for the moment she didn’t feel the cold. London was in the first throes of winter, in the weeks before Christmas, and Mayfair was charming. Festive lights and romance strolling arm in arm in search of mistletoe. Shop windows expertly curated and custom wreaths crowning town house doorways. It was beautiful, despite all its snobbery, and despite the vampires – damn them – who lived in penthouses there.

She had snatched up her handbag and coat as she’d wrenched open the door. Her coat she had thrown on out of habit, but her gloves, scarf and hat remained forgotten in the bottom of her bag for the moment. It wasn’t until she’d long left the building, and wandered the streets down past Berkeley Square that she realised she wasn’t cold, despite evening gusts of wind and the flakes of snow which so sneakily danced above her head, never stooping low enough to touch the ground.

“Damn him.” She pulled out the scarf and twisted it around her neck desperately before she squashed the hat down over her mussed-up auburn hair with little ceremony.

The gloves annoyed her, so she didn’t put them on. The truth in its most disturbing form was that she wasn’t cold at all. Not in the slightest.

Even the snow tickling her face did not faze her.

The truth, in its most plain form, was that she was dying.

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Tagged: all the vampire boys you ever had a crush on, blood, blood sucker, bored of tags now, but not really, definitely not really, Edward Cullen, fan fiction, fantasy, gore romance, horror, interview with a vampire, kardashian vampires, lestat, romance, short stories, sort of, thriller, twilight, vampire, vampire diaries, vampire fiction, vampire romance, vampires

Episode 4 – The Old Forest & the myth of creation – New Zealand Roadtrip Video

For me in particular this leg of the journey was quite an emotional one. Maybe I’ll write a proper tale about it sometime to document the stories and myths that it evoked in my mind. Seeing the hordes of glow worms dwelling inside the Waipu Caves was awesome, but for me it was the journey into Waipoua Forest. The ancient kauri forest in the Northland of New Zealand is seeping with creation. Especially as we saw it, in the golden hues of sunset.

Kauri is a hardwood tree native to New Zealand. It’s the tree our people carve their mighty war canoes – the waka taua – from, though it will take you a good five or six hundred years to grow one big enough. The trees are sub tropical rainforest giants with smooth trunks and towering canopies, some of which support their own microcosm of life, with the branches so high and remote from the rest of the forest.

They are also dying. Like the sunset fell beneath the western horizon on the evening we visited, they are slowly fading away, one by one. I pray the steps we take to protect the precious ecosystem they survive in does succeed in keeping them safe. You’ll see in the video what we had to do before entering each part of the forest to ensure we didn’t bring contamination on our shoes from other areas. It’s the least we can to, because it’s not a nice thing at all to see a tree that must have lived to be over a thousand years old, now sticking out of the roof of the forest a pale, dry skeleton. It’s strangely sad. I mean, trees get chopped down every day, and I don’t have a problem with it generally, I’m no tree hugger, I understand the cycle of life and the need to farm trees for a million different reasons, but to see a dead kauri, is different.

But we came all this way to see a live kauri. The oldest and biggest kauri recorded, sizing up at 13.77m girth and rising 51.2m up into the sky. He does indeed support his own ecosystem within the boughs of his branches and separates sky from earth. His name is Tāne Mahuta.

How Tāne Mahuta broke hearts and brought light into the world (a.k.a My very short and under-embellished version of the beautiful Māori creation story)

When the world was new, Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatuanuku, earth mother, were deep in love – as they always have been, and always will be. Locked in a tight embrace they could see nothing but their love for each other. Between their bodies, the world was dark and space desperately limited. It was here their children struggled to live and breathe, growing impatient of their parent’s love, the strongest son, Tāne Mahuta, finally rose up. He planted his feet firmly in the earth of his mother, and pressed his arms into his father’s chest, and he pushed.

As he separated his parents, light flooded into the world. Ranginui cried for his wife, and the rains came. Papatuanuku wept for her husband’s touch, and the rivers and streams sprung forth from the earth, running down her face and over her body. Realising what he had done, life sprung forth from where Tāne Mahuta had rooted his strong legs into the earth, and plants, flowers, and all kinds of vegetation grew to clothe his mother. Tāne Mahuta is the father of all these things, and the god who created space and released light into the world, leaving Ranginui and Papatuanuku to still mourn the loss of their great romance.

It’s one of my favourite legends, and certainly the most romantic, heart-breaking creation myth that you will hear. And yes, okay, I got a wee bit emotional, but stories and legends are my life blood, they mean everything to me, because what would our world be, without stories to be told? (Spoiler alert: that’s the final, unedited chapter of Emmeline, if you know, you know?)

Okay, now to the actual blurb and the episode! (and don’t worry, the whole thing isn’t a sappy romance about tree-hugging)

Episode 4 – The Old Forest

This is the Northland of New Zealand as we saw it, beaches, caving for glow worms, ancient forests and beautiful lakes off the beaten track. Uretiti Beach, Waipu Caves, Waipoua Forest with all it’s ancient myths and legends, where we pay homage to Tane Mahuta, the god of the forest, and finally our campsite at the remote Kai Iwi lakes.

Tagged: adventure, aroundtheworld, backpacker, explorer, getaway, hotel, ilovetravel, intrepid, journeys, kardashian, kauri, Maori creation story, Maori myths, māori, New Zealand, passportready, postcardsfromtheworld, Roadtrip, tourism, Tourist, travel, travel advice, travel advice asia, travel advice new zealand, travel blog, travel bloggers, travel stories, travel video, traveldeeper, traveler, traveller, travelling, travelphoto, travels, traveltheworld, travelwriter, Tree, trip, Tāne Mahuta, vacation, visiting, waipoua, wanderer, wanderlust, webseries

Holy s#%t! The mother of Rock Festivals is set to bring it again for 2018!

Just because I love spreading the Download love, here’s a bit of an insight to what Download 2018 will be bringing us. Including my personal to-die-for list, Marilyn Manson, Black Veil Brides and In This Moment (be still my beating heart