Steve Irwin Style

Reporting live from the interior coastal city of Escuintla, Guatemala, where Hurricane Dean just passed by, we have our foreign correspondent, Ally, reporting live on the scene.

Ally, what's it like down there?

It's (adverb) (adjective) Scott. Hurricane Dean is one (adjective), (adjective), (noun). In Escuintla, the effects have been (adverb) (adjective). Further north, where I'm traveling over the next two weeks, I expect to see (adjective) (noun) and (adjective) (noun). In the rest of the country, people are (adverb) (adjective). This is Ally, reporting live, in Guatemala.

Thanks Ally, and now back to our regularly scheduled programming:

I've been in Escuintla to visit Autosafari Chapin, an animal conservation park and zoo for wealthier Guatemalans. The park is amazing. It has animals from all over the world, endangered and otherwise, separated into different drive-through paddocks. The crazy rainstorms, a residual effect of Hurricane Dean, made the animals shy and the Ally wet, but it, combined with the Monday morning, meant that I had the park to myself. It was just my driver and me touring the park.

Moreover, my driver had a very Guatemalan safety ethic. After the first five minutes or so of me saying “a little forward,” “a little back,” and so on and so forth, he inquired, in jest, if I wanted to drive. We set off, with me at the jeep’s wheel, struggling with the stick shift, him screaming instructions in Spanish, the driving rain creating puddles deep enough to drown a small child.

The enclosures were separated by reed fences, each one opening into the next. As we entered the enclosures, my guide would jump out, gesticulating wildly, to get the animals into my photo range. He herded all the zebras over to me, ripped branches off of all the expensive, imported African plants so that I could feed the giraffes and hit the rhinos on the rumps to make them appear more interesting, as well as getting dangerously close to the crocodiles to point them out. In the hippo enclosure some of the animals were in pens. When I inquired why, my guide explained that those animals were aggressive, and had attacked jeeps. Apparently, it did not occur to him that all hippos are aggressive.

I’m sure the animals’ aggressiveness was heightened by the presence of baby hippos. Taking the cues from the Chapins, the Guatemalan zoo animals have been and have been busy getting busy. The zoo encourages breeding by placing the predators upwind, as evidenced by an abundance of baby animals. Needless to say, the juvenile jaguars, lions, giraffes, hippos and monkeys were adorable!

After the dangerous drive around the park, we took a little, leaky, lancha out on the lake adjacent to the park. In the middle of the lake was an island, infested will all sorts of simians. On our arrival, our boat was inundated with monkeys, searching for shelter. One of the little howler monkeys leaned over and put my hood down, exposing my hair just long enough to leave me laughing, soaking and sodden.

(Thanks to Special Correspondent Scott Couric for the weather commentary!)