We had originally intended to visit Milford Sound and its nearest town, Te Anau, before Christmas, but rain forced us to change our plans.

More than two weeks later, and after a diversion of a few hundred kilometres, we arrived in Te Anau on Friday the 2nd in a torrential downpour. (And they say that New Zealand weather is UNpredictable?)

Te Anau is a perfectly respectable little place with a nice main street adorned with restaurants, shops and even a cinema. It's a centre for activities such as walking (known as tramping over here), kayaking and flying.

However, our main purpose in visiting this corner of the South Island was solely a short cruise around Milford Sound - which isn't actually a sound, but a fjord. (Sounds are created by water erosion whereas fjords are the result of glaciers, in case you didn't know.) We had given ourselves three nights in Te Anau, and decided after drying out and looking at the forecast to give the next day a miss and go to Milford on the Sunday.

While checking in, I'd got talking to a local coach driver in the reception. He kept telling me how dangerous the Alpine road to Milford was, regaling me with terrible tales of fatal accidents he'd seen. "The most dangerous road in New Zealand," he insisted, "We can't get people to stay in the fire brigade round here because they're fed up with scraping bodies off the Milford road".

We decided to ignore this apparently wise advice, however, not least because the camp owner kept trying to sell us a package trip on this guy's bus - we think they were actually husband and wife.

We were quite heartened by the weather when we got up, a mixture of high cloud and blue patches overhead with a few darker clouds away in the distance. We hadn't booked our cruise beforehand because Katy was unsure of the weather and had also worked out that there were dozens of possible cruises we could catch.

The drive started off pleasantly enough, over a moor at first then through woods. We waited for the steep gradients, hairpin bends, lunatic drivers and narrow roads which the driver had assured us were coming.

Gradually, the hills started getting impressively mountainous and the clouds became increasingly thick. Rain started to spit down upon us. After climbing higher, we came to a halt at a red light at the start of the Homer Tunnel - a one-way passage through the mountain. Going through the tunnel was slightly disconcerting in that the walls were simply rough-hewn rock; the lighting was pretty poor, as was the road surface.

Once that was done, we descended fairly sharply via the promised hairpin bends - maybe three or four of them in succession . Yes, we decided, the road was getting a bit awkward - maybe the bus driver had been right after all? What terrible challenge lay ahead of us?

Er, nothing.

After that, it was a pretty gentle road down to Milford with hardly any steep sections or tight corners or bad areas at all. And the road was virtually empty. Compared to Bulgaria - or even Porlock Hill for those who know Somerset - it was a perfect doddle.

We'd have loved to see our prophet of doom cope with the road from Plovdiv to Pamporovo, for example, which is similarly mountainous, or even the level run from Plovdiv to the coast which is travelled mainly by psychopaths in Mercedes and 4x4's. In Bulgaria they think that overtaking on blind bends is in fact compulsory rather than a death-wish, and that road maintenance is a luxury that someone else should pay for.

Our concentration on the driving conditions had, however, diverted our attention from the fact that the weather had got significantly worse as soon as we were west of the mountains. By the time we reached Milford the cloud was down at sea-level - or was it that the mist had reached up to the mountain tops? It was also drizzling.

It was so bad that we considered not going on a cruise at all because we thought we wouldn't see much. After a while, however, we decided that we might as well do it on the grounds that we'd come 60-odd miles and would almost certainly never return. We picked the shortest and cheapest cruise though, rather than a more expensive one with lunch thrown in, which we had been considering beforehand.

By the time we embarked, the drizzle had become light rain. Katy was, of course, freezing even in her ski jacket and thermal merino wool ski socks (yes, even in summer), so the first thing we had to do was get a cup of tea. She looked out of the rain-streaked windows with an expression of loathing, so I left her to it and wandered out onto the deck. It was a shame that the weather was poor, but we couldn't really say we'd been unlucky. It rains in Milford 180 days a year, with an average annual fall of 6,526mm.

It is called Milford Sound after the home town of the European who discovered it in 1823 - John Grono, a sealer who came from Milford Haven in Wales. Although Captain Cook had sailed past a couple of times in the 1760s, he hadn't noticed the concealed entrance. The Maori, of course, had found it centuries before that while searching for valuable stones.

The sound was created, as I said before, by glaciers - the last of which retreated about 12,000 years ago. The ocean flooded into the vacant area, creating spectacular scenery with the mountains falling steeply into the sea. In the sunshine, it would have been magnificent.

As it was, we at least had the benefit of the permanent waterfalls in full flood and a host of temporary ones cascading down the sheer mountainsides. With so much rain, there is a layer of fresh water up to three metres deep above the salt water of the Abel Tasman Sea.

Katy did eventually brave the elements (which honestly weren't all that bad) and came out on deck to assume the main photo-taking duties. Our cruise lasted about 90 minutes and in that time we saw a pod of around ten bottle-nosed dolphins and also a similar-sized group of fur seals lounging around on the rocks. After it finished, we ate our sandwiches in the car park - there is only one café in Milford - and headed off on our (non-) perilous journey back to Te Anau.

Did I speak too soon, however?

We stopped beside the Hollyford River so Katy could take a couple of photos of the beautifully blue water as it frothed over the rocky riverbed. We had missed the proper stopping place, so pulled in at a road turning and Katy went down a narrow path clutching the camera.

After a few minutes I went from wondering just how many photos she was taking to considering the possibility that she had fallen in and was by now half way to Lake McKerrow. I got out of the car to see Katy stumbling back up the path clutching her left hand. She had slipped on a wet and mossy rock and had hurt the back of her hand in the fall.

It's swollen up quite a lot but she's pretty sure nothing is broken as she can move all her fingers. If it had been me, I am certain I would have broken at least a couple of digits if not the whole wrist. As it is, I'm on vegetable-chopping duty for the foreseeable future!

Richard