A North American tourist wears a T-shirt announcing "I survived the road to Monteverde." Doubtless, one day, the road from San Jose to Monteverde will turn into a super-highway with garages, phones, road markings and signposts. But some locals would rather the road stayed the way it is.
Hoteliers are not keen on the idea of improvement as it would mean people doing one-day visits instead of staying several. Others say that Monteverde is too small to accommodate many tourists without risking exploitation and damage. However, time, even here, doesn't quite stand still, and in three years a new road has been promised by the government.
For the time being, it takes five long hours from San Jose, the last two travelling at an average of 20kmph along a winding, potholed track, sweating, breathing dust, bumped from one side of our four-wheel-drive hire car to the other, eyes stinging, throats dry, praying not to get a puncture.
"You see that flat part at the top of the mountain covered in cloud?" Edgardo points out a place that looks a very long way up and a very long way away. "That's where we're going."
You could tell we'd arrived when it wasn't hot anymore, but cloudy and damp, and instead of the odd shack at the side of the road, there were signs to small hotels. At Santa Elena, we get out of the car and notice the roar of the wind through the tree tops - a sound that would intensify at night, accompanied by the shrill screeches of birds. At Cerro Piano, we call in at the supermarket to buy the rudiments of dinner and breakfast for our self-catering bungalow: 400 grams of eggs, a watermelon, a green tomato, a couple of onions and some beer.
Accommodation
The wood chalet we've booked at Cabañas Los Pinos is dark and gloomy inside, but relatively insect free - the shower works, there's a coffee-maker, a huge empty fridge and a camping gas stove. We make an omelette, drink the beer and collapse into bed. We've made it, but however tired we are, that first night none of us sleep. In the early hours, Sara wakes with a start, "What's that noise?"
"Which noise?" I ask. The cabaña seems to toss on the sea at night. The wind roars through the trees. It sounds like the corrugated-iron roof is being lashed sporadically by handfuls of pebbles or grit. The roars and bangs of the wind are punctuated by bird calls.
The morning light comes suddenly at 7am, like a child waking - it's night one minute and day the next.
The first morning, and the weather puzzled us. Looking out of the window, it could have been the Yorkshire Moors - cloudy and drizzly. But by mid-breakfast, the sun shone and the sky was clear blue. It's confusing - the wind still roaring, a fine mist, cool yet warm. A cacophony of birdsong, and still the wind through the pines.
The cloud forest
On our first walk through the cloud forest, we saw no animals - just enormous trees, dangling creepers, centipedes, huge termite nests. So wet you weren't sure if it was raining or not - but it wasn't. The drip, drip, drip everywhere of water on leaves and the odd whistle of a black-faced solitaire high in the canopy.
Yes, it was extraordinary, but not at all like the TV wildlife films - we saw no tree frogs or snakes or monkeys, and, disappointingly, had no sense of danger. It wasn't until the last day, from the bridges of the vertiginous "sky walk", that we spied a colony of howler monkeys lounging in the branches of nearby trees, keel-billed toucans flashing across the gaps in the branches, brightly coloured and banana-shaped in flight, and quetzals.
On our return flight, we met an elderly gentleman from Whitehall who had braved the "Sky Trek": more high bridges suspended in the tree tops, the platforms linked by zipwires: a "jumping, flying, gliding experience showing what it's like to be an inhabitant of the canopy".
In the, admittedly netted, Butterfly Gardens, we saw the cappuccino butterfly, the "transparent" butterfly and the electric blue morpho. At the Hummingbird Centre, hummingbirds whizzed past our ears with a whirring of wings, to hover over red plastic nectar-filled dishes before taking a drink. Sleepy snakes in the Serpentarium were curled up in recycled public telephone boxes, complete with graffiti.
The people
Personally, I was more fascinated by the human environment. "People can live anywhere," Edgardo says. It is so isolated. Although there is electricity and hot water, schools, medical facilities, the shacks at the side of the road seem basic: two rooms, thin wooden walls, corrugated-iron roofs. Dust clouds from the road mixed with black smoke from the exhausts of buses and trucks. Revving of quadbikes and motorbikes, which intermingle with the horses. Four-wheel-drives rocking up and down the stony, potholed and pitted road.
And what's it like in the rainy season, April to November, when the tourists aren't here? Torrential rivers with narrow flimsy wood bridges. Rockfalls. Deep brown sludgy streams of mud. Driving along in the pitch black of night - certainly no street lights, or road markings.
Tourists might not be here at all if it hadn't been for a group of North American Quakers in the 50s who wended their way up the oxcart trail and bought land for homes and farms, and also the cloud forest which they sensibly left untouched.
Conservation
Too much of Costa Rica is now deforested land - farming and logging have laid the mountains bare. The Monteverde Conservation League (MCL) aims to restore and then conserve deforested areas through educating and working with the forest's neighbours, and buying up surrounding land. The ultimate dream of the conservationists is to create a "corridor" of cloud forest through Central America, without which larger animals are at risk of extinction and biodiversity is under threat.
The Bosque Eternel de los Niños, or Children's Rainforest, works with the MCL to educate children and their families, both locally and around the world, about the cloud forest so that they understand and are involved in the effort to sustain and extend it.
The beaches
Coming down from Monteverde after five days felt like coming back to earth from another planet. After another long, hot drive and a ferry, we eventually found Montezuma on the Peninsula de Nicoya, at the end of another long stony track. Costa Rica has become the extended backyard of the US, and tents are erected with hammocks under every available palm tree. Idyllic in a palm-fringed, beachy kind of way, and terribly hot.
One evening, a downpour of mangoes from the trees heralds the presence of white-faced monkeys, driven from the sparse inland hills to the wooded coastal areas. Indeed, it is at the coast that we see at close hand iguanas, enormous crickets, urraca birds, squirrels and a parrot.
At night, the waves roar instead of the wind, but it sounds very similar.
Settling back into English life, I'm struck by the comparative silence - no howling wind, no crashing waves. I laugh to see the council resurfacing relatively even roads, and I think myself lucky to have a fox in my back garden. I imagine the elderly gentleman sauntering round Whitehall, and decide that if we ever do go back, I'll definitely have a go on the zipwires...
