New Zealand/Aotearoa Crosswords. 60 crossword puzzles Entertaining, interesting, and educational. One crossword puzzle per page and the solutions are at the back of the book. Kia ora (hello) and haere mai (welcome) to New Zealand/Aotearoa Crosswords. This book includes 60 interesting, inspirational, and educational crosswords - all about New Zealand/Aotearoa. These crosswords aren't intended to be fiendishly difficult like those impossible cryptic crosswords published in the newspapers. These puzzles don't obey the normal rules of crosswords - they're not symmetrical and sometimes answers are repeated. These crosswords are to help you learn more about New Zealand/Aotearoa. New Zealand/Aotearoa is on the ring of fire, on the edge of the Pacific tectonic plate. The land was formed as the two tectonic plates crash together. The country is made by earthquakes and mountains and volcanoes and glaciers and rivers and the weather. Earthquakes push the earth's crust upwards and erosion brings it down again through glaciers and rivers and onto plains and beaches. The country is a collection of big islands and small ones. There are no land-dwelling mammals and flightless birds such as kiwi, kakapo, and weka fill this ecological niche. The country stretches from the sub-tropical Kermadec Islands up north to the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands in the far south. The Chatham Islands to the east are across the date-line, which would've been inconvenient so we moved the line out around the Chathams. There are crosswords about our cities: Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin... and there are crosswords about all of the regions, from Northland all the way down to Fiordland. There are crosswords that focus only on rivers, and lakes, and mountains, and beaches & bays. Completing these crosswords will be like bundling yourself into a camper-van for a road trip from Ninety Mile Beach near Kaitaia down to Wellington, across Cook Strait to Marlborough and on down to Te Waewae Bay near Tuatapere - and then across Foveaux Strait to Stewart Island/Rakiura. You know the old saying - Kore rawa e rawaka te reo kotahi. (One language is never enough.) You can't learn about New Zealand/Aotearoa without learning some 'te reo Maori' - the Maori language. For example, most place-names are known by their te reo Maori names. So are most of our birds and sea life and plants. Most are very easy to pronounce. The vowels (a, e, i, o, u) are pronounced as in this sentence: 'Are there three or two'. 'Wh' is pronounced as an f and an r tends to make a soft d sound. We say what we see. And that's about all you need to know to pronounce te reo correctly. Whether you're doing these crosswords in the departure lounge or in a plane on the way, or even in a comfy armchair at home, kia pai to haerenga (bon voyage) - and remember the old saying, 'the journey is just as important as the destination'. Every journey begins with the first step, so go ahead and add this book to your shopping cart.