Our guide for a cloud forest tour, Adrian, met us at the hotel bright and early. He was friendly, and more talkative than our previous guides. We had to drive to the reserve, so Adrian got in our car and we set off down the bumpy road. Although it was early, lots of people were out.

As we got closer to the park, Adrian asked us to pull over where he saw a friend of his standing by the side of the road. It turned out the friend was a photographer shooting two resplendent quetzals in the trees.

We got out the binoculars and scope and got a good look at the male bird, with its long tail hanging down and its feathers shining emerald green. The color was more like something you'd see in a tropical fish. The bird was sitting in a tree roughly 30 feet from the road, facing us and, according to Adrian, guarding a nearby nest. Adrian soon found the less brightly colored female.

Quakers from Alabama founded Monteverde in the 1950s. Unhappy with the American draft, they sought a place where they could live, and Costa Rica's lack of an army drew appealed to them. They started dairy farming at a factory that we passed along the side of the road. With the money, they bought the land that makes up the biological reserve. It is still not a national park.

The reserve charged a $12 entrance fee and only allowed 150 people at a time to enter. We were early enough to head right in.

Almost immediately, around the first corner, we saw another pair of quetzals (they mate for life and it was the nesting season). Both birds flew away, and we were unable to follow them through the forest.

The cloud forest was much more rainforest-like than the actual rainforest. The ground was covered in ferns and moss, two things rare in Corcovado and Arenal. The clouds left dew on the trees, which constantly dripped, like rain, and the whole forest was wet and misty.

Adrian was excellent at spotting plants and birds, and especially good at calling birds.

One bird, probably the loudest in the forest, was making noise like a creaky gate, or like microphone feedback (like when a comedian's joke falls flat, and then there's that awkward silence followed by the whine of the microphone). How Adrian found the bird, we have no idea, since we couldn't see it without the telescope.

Somehow, however, he found this fist-sized gray and black bird way up in the trees, and got the scope set up so we could see. Even after looking at it through the telescope, we couldn't find the bird in the trees. "That's what you're paying me for," Adrian said with a smile. It was amazing that such a small bird could be so loud.

After seeing the loud bird, we focused on plants for a while. We saw a few strangler figs that had completely killed the tree, which had decomposed, leaving a really tall vine wrapped around nothing at all. We also saw trees bent over under the weight of epiphytes and vines.

On one, Adrian said there was half a ton of dry plant material that, when the water soaked up by the moss and other plants was added in, made the tree's position pretty precarious. It was already leaning out at about a 45-degree angle from the hillside, and it seemed like a strong gust of wind would take it down. Still, Adrian said he had been telling people for 10 years that the next storm would knock it over.

He also showed us all the plants a person could use in the forest - a kind of palm to eat, another plant to collect water and some berries to write with. He picked one berry and crushed it, creating a pool of magenta ink in his palm. With a sharpened stick, he drew a bird on Hari's hand and, while humming the pink panther song, a panther on Eric's.

We also picked the leaf of a plant that allowed invisible writing. Adrian scratched "Bienvenidos a Costa Rica" into the leaf with a knife, and the scratches disappeared. When he pulled it out an hour later, they showed up as dark brown against the green leaf.

Monteverde is famous for, among other things, the golden toad. The bright orange toads numbered in the thousands in the mid-1980s, when suddenly they disappeared. Research groups came in 1988 and found them in the hundreds, not breeding, and in 1989 only one was found. They have never been seen again. Adrian, who was working for the reserve at the time, claimed to have been the last person to see the golden toad alive. We confirmed many of the details of his story in our guidebooks, but couldn't confirm that he was the last person to see one.

After hiking for a while, we reached a long suspension bridge over a forest-filled chasm, which allowed us a view of the canopy. We saw tons of birds on the trees, and Adrian identified all of them with amazing speed.

As we neared the end of the bridge, two giant guans - all black except for a neon blue beak - landed in the trees next to us. We got an excellent close-up view from about 10 feet away. When the guans flew, their wings flapped and made a loud clapping noise. According to Adrian, guans were hunted to near extinction before making a recent comeback.

Adrian seemed pleased that we had seen four quetzals and four guans in a day, since both were relatively rare. When we left the bridge, he started calling the birds, particularly the quetzals. Although a few responded, they were far off down the valley and we never saw it. He also managed to get a few other birds to respond, and once, when we heard a loud guide below us on a separate trail, Adrian imitated a howler monkey until we heard the loud guide tell his group they had heard a monkey.

Our final stop inside the reserve was a spot where Adrian had seen a baby pit viper the day before. It was still there, and Hari was able to get very close to take a picture. Adrian urged her closer, saying that it was "not coiled to strike."

While we were in the gift shop, Adrian came running in to have us look at an orange-bellied trogon that had landed outside. As we looked, a troupe of howler monkeys in nearby trees started making noise. Adrian and another guide took turns grunting at the monkeys, which were crossing in the trees high over the road.

We passed on to a platform of hummingbird feeders, where we found six different species of hummingbirds hanging out and eating. Adrian said Europeans were most fascinated by the hummingbirds, because they don't have them in Europe, Asia or Africa.

A rainstorm was moving over Monteverde, but we set out anyway to try and find some souvenirs. We went to the CASEM store, some form of women's cooperative with arts and crafts from local women. We tried several more galleries along the route home, but each was a little too art-oriented, and not quite enough mass-produced trinket-oriented.

In one gallery, we walked in on the owners having lunch in the main room. They allowed us in anyway to look at the art, and they laughed when Eric said "buen appetito" on the way out. Having had no success, we decided to call the souvenir shopping off and go to the frog and amphibian house just down the road from our hotel.

We saw all sorts of frogs in our 45-minute tour, led by a local kid with an alarmingly good grasp of American slang and pop culture (he said that a frog reminded him of gollum, and, speaking of a frog species where the female was larger than the male, "we know who wears the pants in this family," and then that something was "rocking the house." He had never been out of Monteverde).

We liked the frogs, which were mostly small and cute. Many of them were also extremely poisonous, such as the poison dart frogs and blue jeans frog.

One terrarium was empty, with just a tag saying "golden toad" at the top. The guide explained that this was a memorial to the golden toad, plus 10 other species of recently extinct amphibians.

"Ahh," said the two English girls on our tour, peering intently into the empty tank.

A memorial tank to the golden toad, the guide reminded us.

"Ahh," said one girl, bending down and looking around. "So where is it?"