When we arrived back at John's office the next day, our guide was waiting for us with his 4x4 parked outside and ready to go. Bruce, which is what I'll be calling him on the basis that I'm really not that good at recalling names and, let's face it, every man in Australia is called Bruce, was a jolly sort with a thick Aussie accent who spent the entire tour pointing at things and explaining the age and history of everything we walked past in a loud and confident tone. As do most Australian guides, he had a big floppy Akubra hat on the seat next to him in the car, which he made sure to take with him whenever we got out to walk anywhere, even across the street. However, he seemed a little unsure as to whether he should actually put it on or not, so he mainly used it as a pointing stick to gesture at things instead in a delightfully eccentric way. As we had discovered on our trip along the Great Ocean Road, having a guide to ourselves meant that we had one hundred percent of his attention and it felt more as though we were on a camping holiday with a friend rather than on an organised tour. Bruce was constantly chatting away and keeping our attention as we drove along the winding road into the Styx Valley, shutting up only for a moment when the vehicle suddenly came to a groaning halt half way up a particularly steep gradient. Getting out, he walked around the car as though expecting to find something snagged around the wheels, scratched his head and cracked some jokes about having to camp by the side of the road for the night before restarting the engine and getting us under way again. A few hundred yards later, the car once again came to a screeching halt and I jokingly asked if he was perhaps in too high a gear for the hill we were trying to climb. To my utter astonishment, Bruce looked at us both for a moment, pointed a finger at me and raised his eyebrows as though to say "Aha!", and then congratulated me on being such a smart arse and told us in all seriousness that he hadn't thought of that. After this, we never had any further problems with the vehicle.

As the road began to wind through the heart of the forest and the trees closed around us, we rounded a sharp bend and Bruce suddenly announced that we were at our destination, pulling over into a lay-by which was clearly more of a patch of churned up dirt which people parked on rather than anything official. I remember thinking that if any other vehicle came around the corner at speed while we were away, it would have no chance of seeing our car in time and we'd almost certainly come back to find our only way of getting back to town upside down in the ditch. At the back of my mind, and knowing how wonderfully sarcastic Australians can be, I half hoped that this would happen just to see Bruce turn to me and say "Right then, smart-arse. Sort that one out!"

We clambered down a steep incline after Bruce, who had produced a blue cooler from the back of the car and was trying to stay upright while balancing it together with his hat which he clearly still didn't realise was supposed to go on his head. Once in the forest, we decided that one of us would be in charge of the video and the other would snap away at everything with a stills camera, telling ourselves that this would ensure that, between us, we didn't miss anything. When you look at a photo later, of course, you always want it to have a commentary to remind you exactly what you were looking at - and the video would've performed this function perfectly if we had thought to do any planning in advance. What we've actually ended up with are lots of photos of oddly shaped trees which probably all had fascinating stories attached to them and a great piece of film in which Bruce can clearly be heard not quite completing any of his sentences - there'll be a fantastic shot of a giant eucalyptus tree, accompanied by a disembodied voice saying "...because all the other trees fell down in the terrible... latte with extra sugar" and you realise that there has been a cut at that point and that you have no clue as to what the beginning or end of either story might have been.

One of the things I really liked about our walk through the Styx valley was that it felt as though we were really getting lost in a real forest. Often, these days, woodland seems to be restricted to small well trodden areas where people take their dogs for a walk and sit on benches during the lunch hour pretending that there isn't a city a few hundred yards away. There are plenty of places near me back home where you can wander happily through woodland, following any number of specially marked trails for half an hour or so, but you know that at some point you're going to turn a corner and find yourself stumbling out onto a busy duel carriageway. The Styx, on the other hand, clearly stretched on for miles in every direction and I can honestly say that I don't think we heard another man-made sound for most of the time we were there. Apart from the tramping of leaves underfoot, the only thing that disturbed the peace was the sound of birds suddenly vacating the treetops as we passed or something scampering away into the undergrowth. The pathway on which we walked was a half-hearted affair, a narrow dirt track from which the foliage had been pushed aside but over which the forest was clearly already starting to reassert its presence. Sometimes, the track would stop for no reason and we'd have to make our way through the forest for a while, trusting to Bruce's tracking skills and hoping we were going in the right direction, before we'd hit the trail again further on. Giant swamp gums (Eucalyptus Regnans) in the area are considered to be among the tallest hardwood trees on the planet, and it certainly was an incredible experience to be stopped suddenly by Bruce who would point upward and indicate that we should strain our necks and narrow our eyes against the sun to see the distant top of a eucalypt protruding into the sky. An astonishing five metres across, some of these trees are over 260 feet in height (80 metres) - that's the height of a 25 storey skyscraper, and it makes them second in height only to the Giant Redwood trees of North America, where everything has to be bigger anyway. Let's face it, if somebody discovered a tree somewhere in darkest Africa that was taller than a Giant Redwood, the Americans would immediately have scientists working on a way to get the record back.

One of the things I found really funny about our guide back on the Great Ocean Road was his use of the word "probably" throughout the woodland section of the tour. Although it was obvious from the depth of information he was giving us that he knew exactly what he was talking about, he would sprinkle his descriptions with this apparent disclaimer as though worried that we might think that he knew every tree in the entire forest personally. We'd be walking past an interesting looking tree, and he'd say "that is probably a mountain ash" before going on to describe the mountain ash whether it was one or not. Bruce wasn't like this. He would stop regularly and point at something, telling us exactly what it was, it's history and why he loved it personally with a passion he couldn't describe. It was obvious that he came here on his days off and thought of the Styx Valley as his own, something I could wholeheartedly understand. In fact, once we were actually out of the car and into the forest, Bruce quickly got into full narrator-on-wildlife-documentary mode and spent much of the time talking to us as though he was David Attenborough talking to a camera rather than a bloke taking some pommies on a tour. He'd often start sentences by saying something like "Later, we'll be seeing many more of these trees, but for now lets take a better look at this one and we'll see how it's growing from the ground in a particularly unusual way" and I wanted to reply "Also, later, can you talk to us like normal people?"

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.