In 1871, George Bowen - the fifth governor of New Zealand - visited Milford Sound aboard a ship. The fiord was still largely unknown to European settlers, accessible only by sea, with no road and no track through the mountains that walled it in. Bowen brought his wife, Diamantina, a woman of Greek-Italian heritage who had been born on the island of Zakynthos and raised in Athens before marrying into British colonial service. The waterfall that thundered at the head of the fiord was named for her - Lady Bowen Falls, later shortened to simply Bowen Falls. It was a gesture of the era: name the impressive thing after the important person's wife. But the name stuck, and Diamantina Bowen's connection to this remote corner of the South Pacific endures long after most colonial naming ceremonies have been forgotten.

The 9 km Bowen River gathers rainfall and snowmelt from the surrounding mountains of Fiordland National Park before channeling it over the cliff edge. The river does more than supply the waterfall - it generates electricity for the tiny settlement at Milford Sound and provides drinking water to the handful of people who live and work there year-round. Bowen Falls is one of only two permanent waterfalls that discharge into the fiord. Hundreds of temporary waterfalls appear during heavy rain, streaming off every cliff face and turning the fiord into something resembling an enormous shower, but when the rain stops, those vanish. Bowen Falls keeps falling. At 162 metres, it is the tallest of the permanent pair, and from the water below, the column of white water dropping against dark rock is visible from a considerable distance - a vertical white slash against the green and grey of the fiord walls.

The original walking track to the base of Bowen Falls was a straightforward stroll from the Milford Sound wharf - the kind of thing you could do in twenty minutes before or after a cruise. When the rock face above the track was deemed unstable in 2002, that access disappeared overnight. For a decade and a half, visitors could only appreciate the falls from the deck of a tour boat, which offered scale but not immersion. The 2018 solution is elegantly minimal: a short boat ride that skips the dangerous section entirely. Passengers step off at a landing near the falls' base, where the noise is physical and the mist soaks through any jacket within minutes. The falls hit the rocks below with enough force to send spray across a wide area, and on a windless day the plume rises back up the cliff face in a slow reversal that makes the water seem uncertain about which direction to go. It is a small detour in a place that requires enormous effort to reach, and it is worth every minute.