When I first saw Annette’s egg, I thought “what a great design, I wonder what that word on the side means?”. Well, 9 years later, I’m in New Zealand and I finally understand.

Aotearoa is the Maori name for new Zealand, and means “the land of the long white cloud”.

Despite its cloudy reputation, we’ve actually had beautiful sunny weather for most of our two-week adventure. In fact, everyone’s complaining about the heat wave (we found it pleasantly cool, the hottest temperature being about 31°, 10° cooler than Canberra, which is also suffering from a heat wave).

We did see SOME spectacular clouds, especially when we went hunting for Mount Cook.

Maybe it’s cloudier on the north island – most of our time was spent down south.

We saw lots of silver ferns…

Silver fern at Larnach Castle, near Dunedin

… and tikis, on pou whenua (land posts), though I seem to have missed photographing them, other than these ones promoting a fancy new town being developed just out of Christchurch. (My name as a Guide Leader is Pegasus, so I had to take this one!)

I guess I’ll just have to go back to take some more photos of this eggstraordinarily beautiful country.

Thanks, Annette, for giving me an eggy eggscuse to rave about our trip!

Edit: Annette tells me that her NZ trip with her then-new boyfriend was a great success – they are now happily married with two children. Must have been some good vibes!