The second day of our Aussie road trip started on a camping ground just south of Brisbane. We had slept pretty OK in our station wagon with Sini's yoga mat and a couple of Ikea-blankets to soften the floor of the trunk and the tipped back seats. Even the few flying bugs that had flown in the night before hadn't bothered us much. We had a breakfast of uncooked toast with peanut butter and jam, accompanied by porridge which we cooked with some difficulty on our handy gas stove.

We started north at about 9.30 to go to the Australia Zoo. After a while of trying to dodge the road tolls we gave up and took the M1 until Steve Irwin way as the signs suggested. We passed by the Glasshouse mountains national park on the way there and got a glimpse of the mountains from the road without actually entering the park. We reached the zoo finally at about 11.45 and started negotiating the price. The student price was $47 and they would gladly give us tickets for that with our ISIC cards. But we also had a car from Travellers Autobarn which gave us a 10% discount of its own. In the end they allowed us both discounts and a one day entrance for $42.30 per person.

We had been hoping to reach the zoo a little earlier so we wouldn't miss any of the shows and also so that we would have as much time there as possible. Turned out we weren't late after all, there was a wildlife show at the Crocoseum at noon and we just made it. Before that there wouldn't have been anything that special. The show was nice, it started with a presentation of some Australian birds, my personal favorite was a black parrot trained to steal a $5 note from an audience member's hand. After that there was the mandatory huge crocodile and two Aussies messing with it dressed in the same attire Steve Irwin always wore on his show. Steve's never far there, he's on signs and posters, on TV screens sharing his passion for wildlife (even singing about it in a clumsily made video where his speech has been edited to singing), on the arms of a spinning crocodile in the middle of an amusement park teacup ride.

Too bad he's also in a grave and has been for some time. It feels a little strange to have the crocodile hunter's ghost flying around everywhere you go, especially as we realized that we didn't know so much about him to begin with. To hear it from the mouths of everyone working in Australia Zoo, he was the greatest person to ever walk the face of the earth. Maybe he was. Still, it seems a little weird that they've incorporated his children as the new figureheads of the zoo. Bindi has her own island and a boot camp, in addition to huge numbers of books, DVDs and even dolls with her face. Robert has a mullet, just like his dad. It looked bad on MacGyver, not much better on Steve and on his son it looks like someone's hell bent on raising him to be the next crocodile hunter. Luckily his interests are elsewhere. In the gift shop they had a ton of books called "Robert Irwin - Dinosaur Hunter".

Sarcasm aside, we enjoyed the zoo a lot. It focuses on Australian species, many of which we'd never even heard of. They had emu-type things that looked more like the before mentioned dinosaurs than birds. They had a lizard that looked like a pine cone. And then they had the koalas. We'd heard of them and loved them from afar. We went to the koala presentation in the afternoon and learned a lot about them. And we got to pet one too, which was one of the highlights of the day. Another followed shortly after as we entered the area where they keep the kangaroos. Surprisingly they were out in the open so you could pet and even feed them with $2 a bag kangaroo food. We had none but they weren't shy about us and let us touch and take selfies with them.

A funny part about our stay in the zoo was that some of the most interesting animals seemed a little boring to us. That's because we've seen them on this same trip, in the wild! Turtles, yeah, I've swam with them… Komodo dragons, we saw those already on Komodo… Pythons, phew, I saw a guy pull one from the tail… Rhinos, seen them grazing in the wild… A Bengal tiger, yup, seen one chasing deer… We're that cool.

We were at the zoo for about five hours which is more than enough to go through it all. We saw two half an hour shows in that time too and spent a good while in some places. It's not as huge as the one we visited in Singapore in 2013 but I wouldn't rate it any worse. The atmosphere was nice, the grounds well-kept and all the workers were young blonde women. Seriously, I'm not kidding about this, even the volunteers in training were pretty and blonde. Aside from the crocodile handlers in the show I saw one male worker on the grounds. Someone in the human resources department needs to look into this… Back to the point though, we didn't see the animal hospital that would have cost just $2 per person extra because we were running out of time (we went back later and it was just barely worth the money; very small and almost nothing to see). Our contract with Travellers Autobarn didn't prohibit driving between dusk and dawn but hitting wildlife in the dark outside of residential areas wasn't covered by the insurance in any way.

We headed north and northwest towards Maleny that, according to the map we got with the car, had a cheap campground. We passed a couple of caravan parks on the way and asked for prices, which were $30 to $39 per night on a non-powered site. We continued on and were glad to find Maleny Showgrounds charging only $15 per night for all sites. They had good toilet facilities and showers and a nice quiet spot next to a football field. We were very content.

Until…

The first problem was the gas cooker that came with the car. The stove wouldn't stay lit until I managed a DIY restrictor for the base where there were too many holes for my liking (kids, don't try that at home!). After it started running again the flame seemed to be getting smaller and smaller until it died again. Only then did we realize that the gas bottle was empty. Our two kilogram gas bottle had managed to boil a porridge and half a pasta meal. Which means they gave us an empty bottle. I might have said some words then, none of which was crikey… We ended up supping with just the sausages, served slightly warm after a bath in the not-quite-boiling water. It was about the same warmth as the water that had leaked on the floor of the trunk from the 10 liter canister we were provided. The carpet was wet, we had no way to dry it and were supposed to sleep on it. In the end that wasn't the biggest problem about sleeping in the station wagon however. I mentioned the flying bugs we had on the previous campsite. There were none in Maleny, but still they were plentiful in our car. Come to think of it, there hadn't been such bugs outside of the car in Logan either… And was that a cockroach?

The rental car was infested with all kinds of creeps, some that flew and some that crawled. I said more words and we got the tent out, luckily the car came with one. Too bad it had a tag of $45 on it and a sign telling its outside measurements to be 200cm x 180cm. The night was moist to the extreme, it could have rained and we wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. I woke up in the morning with both my hair and my feet wet from touching the walls…

It was not the evening and night we had hoped for after such a lovely day at the zoo. The next morning we were faced with a difficult question: what to do with all of these problems? We had the number for Autobarn's road side assistance but didn't want to call in fear of large phone bills from Finland. So we walked into town instead and looked up the local library that had free wifi. After emailing the rental place we looked around town for a little while and found it to be very nice. It really was quite lovely with little coffee shops and such, it felt like a great place to live. There were bigger stores like Woolworth's and IGA also and the way to the town from the Showgrounds was through a nice boardwalk in the forest. The library itself was a treat with a park and a communal grill outside of it. When we came back there we had gotten an email telling us to call the rental place instead.

So call them we did, but what to do when you have a Finnish service provider and the Australian prepaid SIM-cards cost between $12 and $30 depending on how much internet access you want? We went to a pay phone, for the first time in our lives! They still have those here, some of them even have wifi access. We put a plate sized 50 cent coin into one, dialed the number and soon enough were in contact with our roadside assistance. They weren't unsympathetic to our problems but we didn't manage to get our views through either. My problem wasn't that the water canister was leaking, it was that the floor was wet and I didn't want to be held responsible for any damage done. They just told us to buy a new canister and present them with a receipt at Sydney. I also asked if I could spray insecticide in the car because some of those melt plastic. They just told me to wait 30 minutes before entering the car after spraying. We did reach terms with the gas bottle though and agreed that we could return it empty since that was the way we found it. Otherwise we would have had to fill it on the day of the return or pay a $50 fine (we hadn't opted for the suggested "prepaid" empty return for $35). At least we got all of our problems through to them and were able to go on with our plans without returning to Brisbane. Better yet, after hanging up the pay phone returned our 50 cent coin, since it was a free number. Yay!

So we got the insecticide and sprayed the hell out of those bugs. We emptied the car first and went through every last bit of stuff we had just to make sure we didn't miss any. We also had our gas bottle filled at Town and Country for $7.90 (and they would have charged us $35 to $50 for returning it empty!). After letting the car marinate a while we put our things back in, got a nice hot meal and went in the tent once more, only this time I was a little diagonally and got a much better night's sleep. In the morning we checked the car once more and found it to be littered with dead or dying things. We repeated the poisoning process a couple times more in the following evenings and eventually got to the stage where we felt comfortable enough to sleep inside once more. It took another insecticide to get rid of the last cockroaches but even they seemed to get the hint then. I hope…