Where life rolls with the tides

Ilha de Boipeba, Brazil — WE stood, soaked and shivering, under the awning of a roadside bar. The vibrant colonial city of Salvador was two bus trips and a ferry ride behind us, and the nearest town was miles away. As the rain crashed around us, we were beginning to wonder whether the speedboat that was to pick us up for the final leg of our journey would show.

You don't come to a place like Boipeba island -- a place of alluring, empty beaches, where you can stroll along the turquoise water for miles without running into many people -- without a little drama.

There are no cars on this outpost in the Brazilian province of Bahia. The only road is a sandy tractor path. The place is accessible only by boat. And apparently, ours had been expecting us an hour earlier.

But soon enough, a man using a garbage bag to shield himself from the rain grabbed our bags and waved us toward the docks. My wife, Erin, and I hopped onto his boat and zipped off into the lush mangrove as the rain clouds yielded to a silvery blue horizon. The occasional heron loitering by the riverbanks glanced our way.

We eventually landed on a white sand beach, where a handful of huts served the day's catch. A group of children played soccer on a sandbar in the distance. Some fellow backpackers swung in hammocks outside a handful of colorful cottages at the edge of the beach. Any regrets I may have had about not joining the hordes at one of the more easily accessible beach destinations in northeastern Brazil melted away.

We had been skeptical about our choice. We had been lured more than once to supposedly cool ocean-side resorts that seemed, to us, more like packed theme parks. The most recent disappointment was a trip through Mexico's Yucatan that ended in Playa del Carmen, where we crowded onto the sand with what felt like half of New Jersey.

This was different.

We walked down a path through the tropical foliage about a football field from the beach and entered the Pousada Santa Clara, a tranquil inn run by American brothers Charles and Mark Levitan.

Guests stay in tiled cottages patterned with cheerful mosaics, bright shutters and soft hammocks swinging from private balconies. Ours was a duplex encircled by large banana trees with a view of the sea from upstairs.

At night, you can go to the elegant outdoor dining room, under a \o7palapa\f7, where Mark serves phenomenal dishes, such as Vietnamese chicken with green papaya salad and fresh crab and coconut stew.