The Jeep ride across Ilha de Tinharé to the banks of Rio do Inferno was another story. My driver, 24-year-old Nino, drove as if he were at the wheel of a video game, veering sharply around imaginary obstacles and gunning the engine over gentle swells of earth. The gasps of the two Brazilian girls in the backseat only encouraged him.

Nino had Morro energy: young, hormonal, ready to rock. Boipeba energy, I soon learned, was entirely different. The island is dramatically less developed, and people don't come to Boipeba to party or shop. Those things simply aren't on the menu, unless you count the riverfront bars selling the occasional beer to the occasional traveler, or Arte de Boipeba, where the art consists of Barbie dolls and soccer balls.

If you come to Boipeba, you come to stroll the deserted white beaches, to nap under a palm tree, to stand calf-deep in natural tidal pools and watch electric-blue fish dart around. You come to stumble upon a fish shack, after 40 minutes of stumbling upon nothing at all, where the proprietors will watch you keenly as you eat their grilled lobster with lime juice--they charge just $7--speak to you in Portuguese, and laugh at your dismal attempts to reply.

Tourism is tangential to daily life on this serene, lush island. Mornings in the village of Old Boipeba have a timeless quality. Fishermen mend their nets beneath the shade of almond trees. Horses, tied to soccer goalposts, graze on the village green. Three topless little girls sit on the front stoop of a pistachio-colored house, fanning each other with palm fronds.

Not that the residents of Boipeba are impervious to tourism. A few years ago, 65-year-old Tevinho, a bony fisherman with a glorious bloom of hair, set up the Museum of the Arts of Boipeba in the front room of his house to display the conch shells, the six-foot-high whale rib, and the heads of coral that had become entangled in his net over the past four or five decades. Some of them he has turned into art objects: 100 tiny shells were transformed into a hula skirt for a plastic doll, and a piece of sinuous driftwood had been painted to look like a dragon. A small sign on one of the tables politely requests a donation. When I asked if Tevinho would consider selling the driftwood dragon, he emphatically refused. Impervious to tourism, no--but not entirely seduced by it, either. 

The pousada where I stayed, Santa Clara, was a casually beautiful place, set in an aromatic tropical garden. My room was bright and spacious, with a view of the ocean from the veranda. It's owned by two brothers, one a chef who turns out delicious, creative food--red snapper in passion-fruit sauce, lobster ravioli, shrimp and green papaya simmered in coconut milk--that are a welcome detour from the four standard seafood dishes served everywhere else on Boipeba.

Sitting at the beach at sunset one evening, I was approached by a guy in a T-shirt that read iran: guia turistico. He wanted to know if I'd like to take a walk. He pulled out a picture album of mangrove-lined beaches and azure colonial churches.

Why not? A walk sounded nice. We set off at 8:30 a.m. with two middle-aged Frenchmen who arrived with no shirts, no sunscreen, no water--nothing but a pack of Marlboro Reds between them. Our "walk" turned out to be an 18-mile trek up blazing sandy paths, through dense forest, and across waist-deep rivers where Iran advised us to look out for crocodiles. Iran--whose distinctly un-Brazilian name was inspired by a word on a cigarette wrapper his father spotted during his mother's pregnancy--had encyclopedic knowledge of Boipeba's jungly interior. He pulled silvery green fronds from the ground and squeezed their clear liquid onto my hair to make it shiny. He tapped the trunk of one tree until it oozed milky sap, which is used by children to create soccer balls and by their mothers to calm upset stomachs. When my energy started to flag, Iran tucked a minty-smelling leaf into my waistband, claiming it would cool me down and reenergize me. Placebo effect, perhaps--but it did work.

Because Iran and I spoke barely a word of each other's language, all of this information was conveyed through expressive pantomimes. Occasionally, I made tentative forays into conversation, piecing my 15 words of Portuguese into makeshift phrases.

"Do you have children?" I asked.
"Yes," Iran said. "Two."

"They are small men or small women?"
"Thy are small men."

T"e main event at night on Boipeba--in fact, the only event--is going out for dinner. There are but a handful of restaurants open in the evening, which means that you run into half of the tourists on the island wherever you go. After a few days, I knew them all, at least by sight: the Israeli woman with the jailbait boyfriend, the Swedish guy who couldn't hold his caipirinhas. My last night on Boipeba, all of the guests at my pousada walked en masse to a pizzeria, where I ran into the shirtless French guys I'd hiked with the day before, as well as the girls who had gasped their way through the Jeep ride to the banks of Hell's River. Returning from dinner, I glanced longingly at the bars strung along the river, consumed with thoughts of dancing. But they were dark and empty.