I said to her, “Go to Monteverde because there’s great cloud forest hiking – you might see the resplendent quetzal whose colorful tail feathers can grow to twice the length of its body — and it will attach you to the golden toad, now extinct, which once lived in the temporary pools brought by the mountain mists in the spring. Somehow evolution produced this miniature masterpiece, bufo periglenes, the brilliant toad, but it has now disappeared from the Earth. Once you hear the story, the legend, as it were, of how in the 1960’s a scientist discovered dozens, no hundreds, of orange toads, spectacular against the cloud forest floor, together mating in the spring, in an orgy that lasted a few weeks and how they were never seen at any other time of year, and how in the 1980’s only a handful were seen until in 1989 only one lonesome toad was spotted – looking in vain for a mate — and they’ve never been seen since, your vacation, your journey, will be endowed with a sense of tragedy about the nature of life. This might be more than you’re looking for in such a short trip (whether the cause was a fungus, weather patterns, airborne pollution, or some combination thereof) so you might prefer instead to go to a beach like the one at Quepos, where there are lazy sloths and mischievous squirrel monkeys in nearby Manuel Antonio National Park and there’s great body-surfing and boogie-boarding. Life is short, after all.”