The Facts:

Who: Jordan Stratford, 34, and Zandra Gutierrez, 25

Where: Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, about 800 km south of Rio and 10,000 km from home

Why: to brand an Internet startup company building an online reservations system for vacation rental properties...

... and to recover from two recently failed relationships.

Sunday night. We have been here for 12 days. Philips house, in the jungle hills above Lagoa - it is beautiful here, the house monastic and empty of any furniture and is all architectural detail. The gloss of floorboards and the vault of red beams.

I am near naked, wearing only the khaki shorts I live in here, and scratch at my peeling sunburn that leaves my body in small, celophane sheets. Zandra is cooking pasta in the kitchen, wearing only my white t-shirt. Elizabeth and Sebastian asleep upstairs, Philip again at the office. There is a small kitten here, white but with sparse fur so that she appears pink most of the time. There is a yellow stain on her tail and her overlarge ears are discoloured to give her the impression that she’s somehow used. She attacks our feet when we read in bed, sleeps on my chest and chews on the silver of my necklace. Her name is Shanti - Sebastian, being two, is constantly trying to murder her. Her ambition is to leave the house, but we keep her inside lest she be eaten by snakes or other jungle creatures.

It is Carnival here. Last night, the night after the car crash, Heloisa (“Elo”) and her ex husband arrived in the pickup shortly after midnight. Zandra and I in costume - I was gothic and romantic in my gigantic white poet’s shirt, black jeans and motorcycle boots and riding crop, she in her platinum wig (“Trixie”), black miniskirt, red crushed velvet top, knee high red leather boots and fishnets.

Hours before, we had spent a lazy day half naked in the hammock on the veranda, where the cliff falls away into the jungle. Zandra cut my hair, having sharpened her scissors by cutting tin foil which we rolled into small balls for the kitten to chase. The patient attention to my hair from my lover was welcome and calming.

Elo: We drove first up to the old church to her brothers’ bungalow to trade cars (her truck accomodates two, three at most, and received a flat at the bottom of Philip’s precarious driveway). Then to a very dishevelled neighbourhood off from the Centro of Floripa, a dangerous and urine soaked abandon of a district.

These: In the floodlights of the old church, a pack of wild jungle dogs trying to eat the smallest and oldest of their number.

Drag queens everywhere, and families of samba dancers in Carnival attire wandering from bar to bar.

A brother and sister, perhaps nine, selling American cigarettes and beer from the back of a small car and hot dogs cooked from the exhaust.

A horse cart full of crushed empty beer cans. A small skinny boy no more than five curled asleep among them.

An odd British pub, playing 10 year old American pop music, selling warm Brazilian beer.

The women in line to the washroom, who go into the small toilet stalls two at a time.

An ugly man of around thirty in a small pink tank top turning rough trade outside the bar’s window - human feces in the street - the toothless acne-scarred boy in a football jersey guarding our car for two reais, he carries a small, yellow plastic handled kitchen knife for protection.

In the bar we meet several friends of Elo’s, and our friend Nikko from work. Nikko has a friend from Paris, an electrical engineer studying at the Universidade here. It was delightful to speak French again, if only haltingly for ten minutes, but it’s encouraging to remember that I *have* mastered a language other than English, and it makes my Portuguese seem less daunting.

We meet a man who lived in Los Angeles for a year, who went on all night about his deep seated hatred for Americans in his passable English. He warmed considerably when we spoke of surfing. He apparently lived in Lanai for three months out of every year for a decade.

Elo, Autaier, Zandra and I ended up in a Pizza Hut a little after four in the morning, Elo asleep in the red vinyl booth. We were back at the house by five, Zandra asleep in my lap in the back of the car, and I half carried her to bed where we made love in the (finally) cooling night.

Some two hours later Philip woke me, having heard of the car crash from Elizabeth, demanding an explanation. The sequence of days here lacks meaning. Friday night usually does not begin until technically Saturday morning. In Brazil things have a tendancy to take as long as they do, and the brasilieros respond to this by sitting and visiting and kissing strangers and waiting for lines to subside or traffic to dissipate.

Monday night, and I write in the hammock with my laptop cross legged, a tumbler of red wine on the chair beside me. The jungle is crazed with rain, and roars against the sunken sky in large white sheets of lightning. When the rain stops briefly the crickets and the frogs take up the rain’s anthem, and chases the storm east across the lagoon.

I move inside when the liquid crystal of the screen is too irresistable for the night insects.

The night of the crash. Zandra and I parked up from the horrible restaurant where they weigh your food before you eat it, and walked along the surf shops and Austrian dessert bars of Lagoa. Caught in the unexpected rain we find ourselves in a sort of tin roof beer garden populated by surf punks. Hand drawn tatoos and homemade Bad Religion tee shirts. Tequila by measure, here they have never heard of the Marguerita.

We speak too deeply here, and Zandra is afraid to pee in the rancid toilet, so we discover another bar up the street when the rain stops. Here there are stray dogs and strayer clowns, begging for reais at the tables. We hear the samba from drummers up the block - it is the first night of Carnival.

Later in the dancing streets I drop my pants to amuse her, and no one else notices. We spy a beautiful woman with gypsy jewellry and purple hair, she is a tattooist from Brasilia, and she takes us back to the skater bar for the music. There she flirts with Z while administering an elaborate henna knotwork at the top of her spine. I watch and chat with an art student from Sao Paulo who keeps trying to sell me acid, and a tall blonde idiot from Vancouver who speaks of his month in Argentina, and a famous tattoo artist in Barra da Lagoa.

At 3:30 we wind our way back to the car, and Z decides to drive a standard for the first time in several years. The car is a 77 "Fusca" beetle, a company car we aquired some 9 hours earlier. Following the homemade roads to Philips house, we trail the taillights of a motorcycle around a bend, only to take the corner too wide and drive straight through a heavy wooden fence at some speed. The car comes to a halt a metre from a tall concrete wall.

The car of course is in peices, Zandra is in shock but otherwise we are unharmed, something of a miracle considering the car has no seatbelts. I leave the car to survey the damage - the right side is for all intents and purposes missing, the front wheel kicked out an angle like a broken limb. I toss the fence debris further into the yard, and drive the wreck home at 10 kilometres an hour along the lagoon to the house, and park on the broken stones where the road ends outside the small bar at the tiny beach at the bottom of the cliff.

Zandra is crying, her henna now smudged and indelible, our only casualty aside from the antique German steel that litters the street. It is 4 am, and the house is alive with light. Philip is checking e-mail and wants to discuss the database. I excuse myself and put Zandra to bed, kissing her head and telling her how lucky I am to have her alive, and discuss entity relationship diagrams and PHP until five.

Sunday, and a little ferry trip to the north of the lagoon. There a small artists village, and a restaurant with the patron’s hanging laundry between the tables. This next to a beautifully simple church, the steps with patient Brazilian children waiting for their parents. Above the village a waterfall, and we sat on brick ledge underneath the bracing shower. I carried Sebastian on my shoulders down the long path back to the ferry dock, where we waved at passing boats until we were picked up by one with enough room.

Sebastian flirted brazenly with a three year old brasiliera, who reminded Zandra and I of herself, this precocious and attention-basking brown eyed child.

This morning, Tuesday, the last day of Carnival, and we drove to Brava on the northern tip of the island to meet with Flavio, a surfing instructor there. At the bottom of the driveway here we saw the mechanic who lives in the small blue house across from the bar - when he saw the wreck of the Fuscar he changed the tire, without knowing who’s car it was. Apparently the story of the crash is all over the village. The fence belonged to the windsurfing school, which is run by a friend of the mechanic. After he saw the wreck they put two and two together and waited for someone to come forward.

Later in the day we visited the windsurfing school to apologise, and gave them the twenty realis they claimed for the damage. I suspect this had nothing to do with labour or materials costs, but rather reimbursement for a case of beer bartered for the repairs.

Praia Brava: Expected to meet Flavio at ten, and forgot about Brazilian time. He arrived shortly after 11:30, and began the ritual of waxing and combing the boards. He outlined the boards in the sand, and we did exercises to practice leaping to a stance on the board in surf. There is a kata to this, a litany intoned by priesthood that pilgrimages from Hawaii to California to Australia to here. I am a little in awe of it.

I found the act of balancing just to paddle an effort, and my ribs are bruised, the backs of my knees sunburt, and my eyes still stinging from salt. Philip took to this quite easily, and got to kneeling with some of the smaller waves. We are going to buy a board and practice paddling and balancing in the waveless lagoon before attempting one of the more prestigious beaches, Joaquina or Mocambique.

Walking in the heat of the day along Canto de Lagoa, followed by a pack of semi-domesticated dogs. The street is paved with the wreckage of a crushed apartment building. Cracked tile and brick and mirror, chrome and copper plumbing, plastic water bottles, a 3.5" floppy disk cemented in the ochre mud.

Serendipities of language here. A stand on the side of the road with the sign "yes Dog". Strawberry flavoured condoms in the market checkout named "Blowtex". The button on the microwave labelled "Chaos Defrost".

The damage to the car came to four hundred reais, although when the time came, a week later than originally promised, the mechanic stated that another eighty five were required. He says, roughly translated, that the car was damaged in some way, and he had to call a mechanic.

While we argue over the bill, a pair of chickens leave the garage to eat the grass that grows in the cracks of the sidewalk. The mechanic is small and fat, he wears blue flipflops and hot pink shorts. His tee shirt, sweat stained and encrusted with motor oil and lubricant, reads "Fashion Report".

That night, we drive into Lagoa to a small Italian café on the sidewalk. The sky is alive with lightning, the night silent and rainless and offers only this incredible spectacle. The flashes are the purest amethyst, and we gasp and laugh and are made immortal with each strike, every eight seconds or so, for over an hour. Synapses of light. Skeleton fingers, spermatazoa. Quetzal serpents of light. The sparks worm their way into the fabric of our bodies, electrifying our cells and summoning songs of pre-human scale to rush in our blood. I turn and kiss Zandra on the cheek: "I feel like we just got married". She laughs at this, agreeing. Later we walk past the floodlit graveyard, cheerful with bright flowers. The dead here are still considered part of the family, are visited and spoken to and consulted, cared for.

On the way back to the car a drunk inserts himself and demands money. I yell at him in Spanish (my modest Portuguese having suddenly abandoned me) to keep away, fearful not of his violence but for repercussions of my own. I do not relish explaining to the Police why I suddenly decided to assault a Brazilian national. Fortunately the drunk is unaware of my reluctance, and after standing my ground for some time he decides to divert himself by throwing himself at passing cars and banging on the hoods. Once inside the car, it refuses to start, and we again have the drunk's attention.

Finally, after several abortive attempts and a not entirely unintentional lurch at him, the car heads back up the broken road to Philip's house.

Halfway to the house, the accelerator falls off the car. The pedal is no longer attached, and flaps impotently against the floor. After attempting to improvise a manual throttle out of Zandra's hair elastics, there is nothing to be done but push the car (which she has named "Lula", the local word for calamari) up on to the sidewalk and walk home.

This strangeness: Zandra had packed walking shoes to mount the vertical driveway (which the Fusca, under the best of circumstances, could never make) up from the beach. These shoes, now employed for the hike home, begin spontaneously to issue forth hundreds and hundreds of ants! When shaken into the street, handfuls of busy, scurrying insects fall against the hexagonal stones, only to have hundreds more remain in and crawling over the shoes. She decides at that moment to donate the sneakers, permanently, to the Brazilian roadside.

The long quiet walk home, punctuated only by the occasional silent flash of the northward drifting storm.

This revelation, as Zandra and I swing in the hammock in the jungle hills - I have been thus far continuing to play Kimberley's game. I am here, essentially, out of choices I allowed her to make. I am with Zandra, shall marry Zandra, largely due to Kimberley's rejection of me, of my nature. I need tools to deal with this, to escape this, and have again my life based on my own choices.

I know now how desperate her acceptance was to me. I attempted to deliver her from the smallness of her heart, believed fervently that the enormity, the ferocity of my love could in some way rescue her. My failure to do this was in reality her reluctance to ante up, to recognize the invitation. The more I learn about the dynamic of us, the more I see an analog in Henry Miller and Anais Nin and June. Kimberley's destructive nature, her addiction to old angers and hurts, is June's alcoholism. I am reminded of the frog and the scorpion. Horses and water. I was defeated, ultimately, by her nature, by her fear of life, its largeness and intimacy. Zandra is my Nin. I learn again to feel and think and write deeply because of her influence and presence and demonstrative love.

The other morning I received e-mail from my mother, warning me of my grandfather's impending death. Hours later a message from my sister, how he died in his sleep.

I write this for the funeral;

I send to you a gift my grandfather gave me as a child - the Secret of Breathing Under Water.

This gift: given one magnificent jewel-bright summer, on a weed-slippery dock on Shawnigan Lake. My grandfather's strong body dove into the green water with a purpose and certainty that eluded me - I was afraid of the "border" of the water, its division from air and sight.

Sensing this, he quietly pullled me aside, his hand scarred and broken yet strong and capable around my boy-skinny arm. We waded into the slick water, and he smiled as he slid slowly into the bottle green of it, smiling purposefully the whole time. I watched the lake slip over the crown of his head, watched as he sat cross-legged on the lake's silty floor.

And stayed there.

And stayed there.

For hours, it seemed, to a boy of eight or nine. But probably, objectively, for a good three, three and a half minutes. I was rooted to the slime-soft weeds with awe and no small fear.

He resurfaced, finally, not gasping or desperate but with the same saphire-eyed smile with which he'd descended. Like a magician enjoying the amazement of the audience.

The Secret, he told me, was in the quiet of the water. To be as quiet inside your body as the water was to your ears. If you can listen to the water, and let it talk to your body, you can breathe through the skin on your back, breathe through the gentle current between your toes.

Of course some would say that just relaxing the muscles of your body, not straining to hold the breath, would decrease the rate at which the body burns oxygen. This is physiology.

That is not what I'm revealing to you here. That is not the Secret of Breathing Under Water, which is a different thing, a magical thing understood at that moment by an eight year old boy and his grandfather.

No, the Secret is about surviving in an environment larger than you, that surrounds you and draws over you and the smallness of your body. The Secret is about listening to the water, listening for its music and whispers, listening for what it does not say.

My grandfather now slips into waters darker and cooler than the glass green of that Summer lake, yet I suspect the blue of his eyes smiles still in that welcome quiet.

Saturday, and the drive across the small bridge to Porto da Lagoa and the house Zandra has found for us. Another impossible Brazilian driveway, and ultimately the house, unheated and now stripped of appliances, reveals holes in the walls to let in wind and rain. We reject the house, otherwise soaring and charming with a breathtaking view of the island, immediately, and console ourselves from our homelessness by shopping for housewares: pots and tableware and glasses and linens.

The economics here are challenging - at first one notices that everything is perhaps half its North American cost. Then when I factor in that I make only a quarter of my North American salary, everything is suddenly twice as expensive.

More about the death of my grandfather - as I child I saw he surrounded himself with postcard images of the classic Spanish dancer. Jet hair and bone-china pretty, lace fans and jewel-coloured dresses. These pictures tucked in the corners of mirrors, little tea cards, old calendars or printed coasters, and the Spanish dancer smiling sweetly at him around his house.

In the fall as he lay dying, we thought, in hospital, and we said our goodbyes, I kissed the paper skin of his forehead, saw that the light had fled his eyes. I thought then that when death came to him she should come as a Spanish dancer, with fans or castanets, heels clicking smartly, inviting him to dance.

I think now of Zandra's dark eyes and Mexican features, her hair inkblack and worn back with clips that resemble spiders. He would have found her beautiful, the Spanish dancer of his daydreaming.

Further adventures with the Fusca: Elo, against our pleadings, has taken the car back to the local garage for repairs. The bill this time is modest, forty reais for the accelerator and the carburator. We drive home and park Lula on the beach.

The next morning we walk down the steep driveway, to discover the rear quarter panel of the car crushed, the tail light plastic littering the street. A hastily written note, tucked under the (non-functioning) windshied wipers from the neighbour, apologizing with a story of a careless reverse out of a driveway.

Lula is clearly a magnet for trouble.

There is one further incident. As we return late one night from Florianopolis, down the steep switchbacks of the mountain that separates the city from Lagoa. One critical hairpin turn, and Zandra's door flies open spontaneously. Fortunately she is wearing the sole functioning seatbelt.

Later we buy a wooden rosary to dangle from the rearview mirror, and our car problems are miraculously solved. This is a Catholic country, and we are learning to respect its magics.

Between the village of Lagoa and the beach at Joaquina are the dunes, powder soft and golden and thirty metres high. We rent sandboards for five reais an hour, and trek up their exhilarating slopes to the magnificent views at the summit - the entirety of the lagoon northward, east to the perfect surf of Joaquina. The cuts down are terrifying and breathtaking and lightning fast. There is an aliveness to this sport, less a negotiation with gravity than a surrender to it. We are both instantly addicted, and have made this a regular part of our weekends. I have attempted twice the extreme northward face of the dunes, surfed effortlessly by the fearless brasilieros half my age. The second time I wipe out spectacularly, landing on my head and taking compression on my spine, resulting ultimately in the addition of the Portuguese word for "muscle relaxant" to my vocabulary.

The sandboards themselves are simple, beautiful. Fifty four and a half inches of steam-curved, lacquered plywood, plain or adorned with Brazilian flags, stencils of Bob Marley or characters from Japanese cartoons. Found in the local surf shops, the boards fetch around ninety reais.

The boards we buy for each other are simple, relatively unadorned and zen-like. At the shop the brasiliero we buy them from attempts to add to them stickers of flaming skulls, he is startled when we prevent this.

Last Saturday, a sponsored event, and a giant four-by dispensing hats and t-shirts with a cable TV station logo. A helicopter circles the dunes to the blast of four metre high speakers. Even here, this fledgling sport requiring no gear aside from a sixty dollar board, is being co-opted, commercialized, "extremed" and soundtracked.

Zandra is taped by a crew as she straps her heavy leather Fluevog boots into the bindings - that night while buying candles we find a television in a small mercado in Lagoa, and Zandra is there on the screen, the logo superimposed.

That night we have coffee and Austrian desserts at the row of little cafés by the Texaco station that defines the village's heart. An excellent surf guitar band plays out of the back of a truck to the thickening crowd. Zandra buys red velvet slippers in a small shop thick with sandalwood.

When we are paid we buy talismans: A rosary for the car, a painted tile moon for the fridge, a smiling dragon for above the bed.

Our new temporary home is a small pousada resort cottage five minutes from the bridge, along the lagoon. It is charming and clean and bright, with a traditional red tiled floor and dark, louvred woods at the doors and windows, handles of hand-hammered brass grey-green with patina. There are of course the ubiquitous ants, but I fail to notice them anymore - even as I write this they trek dizzily across the phosphor glow of the laptop's screen.

The cottage has two bedrooms, and I think of my children when I look at the small wooden beds. Even though I have some contact with them every day, via e-mail or instant message or a weekly phone call, I ache to see them and count the days until my too brief visit home to them.

Sometimes at night when I cannot sleep from the pressure on my heart, I go to kneel beside the beds, their pressed white sheets, and think of the smell of of my sons' hair.

Another storm. Massive purple wash against the sky, lasting miliseconds. A wild dog finds shelter under the eaves on the pousada's doorstep - we feed him cookies before he is chased away by the landlord.

In the morning we find the road to Lagoa gone. Torn up without warning by a crew that seems to be just learning the bulldozer's controls. We take the long, twenty five minute detour around the south of the lagoon, through Canto de Lagoa. That day, the ignition falls off Lula, almost in protest to the longer drive. This is actually convenient, as the car can now be started with a screwdriver.

There is a lazy joy here, perhaps absent from this diary. The women make long, approving eye contact and smile. People in general warm and helpful and encouraging of my laughable Portuguese. There is music everywhere, most of it dreadful, stringy, and reminiscent of Hong Kong game-show themes, but constant and it affects the way people interact with each other, with traffic, with movement more like the flight of birds. We watch a girl, perhaps eleven, with the hip-centred walk, shoulders back, and arrogant cast to the jaw, a walk precocious but clearly sexual, aware, predatory.

As we drive down the treacherous hill towards Trindade, a suicide wearing only surf shorts jets down the hill at breakneck speed on a bicycle, weaving in and out of the barely braking traffic. Zandra says "Brazil is an extreme sport."

Laundry here bears mentioning - it is one of the domestic tasks, like cooking, that roots me to the real world so easily superceded by pixels and protocols and IPOs. I have seen only one dryer here, as though it were considered a crime to add to the humidity, however minutely.

At our block of pousadas there is a single washing machine, down the gravel road and in the back of one of the cottages. It is the personal property of an older woman who lives here, but she makes it known that others are welcome to it, and she keeps it outside. There is a degree of juggling of hoses in order to complete a cycle, and considered good manners to leave a real for soap.

As the machine is de facto communal, a certain amount of misplaced laundry is inevitable. The practice is to place that which ends up in your basket (but is not yours) out on the plastic chairs in front of your pousada - the neighbourhood will cruise this daily and merely claim what is theirs.

Drying takes two, three days, and is half-hearted at best. The air is too moist to ever truly dry anything, and more than a few days will bleach the clothes from the sun, or be claimed by insects who nest frequently in shirt pockets.

Zandra comes back from the bottom of the road, soaked and laughing and demanding help. The short length of garden hose that is used to manually fill the ancient machine has come away from the wall, taking the entire faucet with it. Water jets from the wall now at high pressure clear across the small back deck, and no one has any idea where the shut off valve is, or even if such a thing exists. Toolless, we rely ultimately on brute force and just jam the mechanism back into the crumbling cement wall. Here, this counts as "plumbing repair".

This on language - the other day we take breakfast at the end of the road, in the hut with satellite TV, listening to CNN. I congratulate myself on my Portuguese, following easily stories on election fraud in Peru, a corruption scandal in Colombia, until I realise the newscast is in Spanish. Oddly my Spanish has flourished at the expense of my English and my stillborn Portuguese. The other day I order dinner in flawlessly conjugated and accented Italian. My conversations are littered with French pronouns, Japanese verbs. For whatever reason the language here refuses to take root in my brain. My accent is good, I am told, but I slip into adjacent Spanish at the slightest opportunity, and occasionally French, when I read. To me Portuguese is what would have happened to Latin if the Empire, instead of being stomped by Visigoths, had instead decided to embark upon a two thousand year tequila bender. Clearly I am just not getting this.

We return in 26 days. Two months ago when we arrived, it was to stay for a year, but the beauty and the wildness of this place has not held us, and we will return to a greyer place, with mountains the colour of steel instead of emerald, the sky in turn grey or salmon or copper and not this blue, blue, blue that leaves us naked without a blanket of cloud.

We are returning to our small Pacific city, our cafés, marinas, bookstores, and my children. We are deleriously happy at the thought of it.

The company charters a small schooner, and leaves from the Northern end of Santa Catarina to the jewel island of Anhatomirim, a paradise with a romantic colonial fortress. The garrison is now a museum dedicated to the island's bloodless history, and to an exhibit on the Bay of Dolphins, into which we sail on the return trip. The walls boast soaring arches of moss covered stone, and small brilliant flowers grow in the fire-scarred masonry, a storybook elfin stronghold.

While our friends swim in the ocean I sleep in the sun on the ship's deck, Zandra curled on my chest and purring like a kitten at the perfection of the day. Exhausted and sunwarmed, even into the cooling night, we stagger sleepily into an overpacked restaurant in Lagoa. The waiter leaves us with a bottle of bad wine and does not return for over half an hour - we are dismissed when we call for his attention. Feeling like high school kids we get up and leave, the bottle mostly gone, without paying.

We end up at the small wine shop/italian deli that is our regular haunt. It is here that we buy our nightly bottle of exhorbitantly overpriced Valpolicella. It is our only true luxury here. The shop's proprietress is a small eversmiling readheaded woman named Karina who speaks no English - we translate in hastily drawn cartoons and pantomime, and the crossroads tongue of "Portanol".

Around midnight we walk to the outdoor skater bar by the lagoon.. There is something about this place that leads us to disecting and resolving our past relationships, a therapist's couch with tequila and punk music.

As the road to Porto da Lagoa is still closed, we drive home south through Canto da Lagoa. On one treacherous curve, an oncoming bus slaloms into the wrong lane and heads directly towards us, swerving away at the last second. It is a few moments before Zandra and I realize we are still screaming, and we laugh nervously all the way home.

The pousada has a modest pool toward the bottom of the road. We swim naked under the overbright stars, the milky way alive and writhing, terminating in the magnificent broadsword of the Souther Cross, the night folded in velvet blue. We speak of stars, the connect-the-dots constellations here meaningless to us, the million-year journey of photons across space from now-dead stars only to rain down on our swimming bodies.

Foolishly I dive into the too-shallow "deep end", cracking my head on the pool's floor. Everything is shockwhite and silent. I have a bruise on my forehead that swells like an avacado, that I wear with some sheepishness. It is three a.m. and we take our watercooled, starbathed skin to bed.

We have discovered our Religion. It is Life. Its tenets are love, and food and wine and sex and natural joy, art and beauty and drunkenness, stargazing and swimming in the ocean. It has a great deal to do with cooking, browsing in used bookshops, children, desserts, flirting, pregnant bellies in the market, stray dogs, lighting too many candles and smiling at strangers. Its cathedrals are lightning skies, clean sheets, storm beaches, the wind on the sand that is the breath of god shaping and forming and molding the dunes.

It is a Religion without a priesthood, but rather a Knighthood. It must be quested for, and championed, fought and bled for. Its saints are Miller and Nin and Picasso, Rosetti, Byron, Joyce and Leary and all rebel angels. Surfers and street musicians, poets and magicians are its altar children.

This is a great and terrible secret.

Exhausted early on by the limited, bad food in the handful of restaurants in Lagoa, we cook here in the cottage with its toss-a-match-and-run gas stove and small Japanese refrigerator that resembles an oversized bread machine. Our menus invariably turn to pasta, and garlic, and red wine, with whatever we can devise to hold these dietary staples together.

I enjoy the freedom to cook. To enter into a kitchen without it being a challenge to my ex-wife's territoriality. This has become something Zandra and I do together, plan and shop and chop and fry and stir while drinking wine and chatting, just being together. The simple act of feeding each other.

Everything from the bread to pastries to pizza to dessert here contains chicken. Tudo com frango. We insist we are vegetarians: the Portuguese phrase for "I am a vegetarian" roughly translates into "Thanks, I'll order the chicken". Seafood is hour-fresh and inexpensive, and the fruits are enormous and seem to hum with life. Real vegetables are scarce. The country knows nothing of pastry.

Sandboarding has become an integral part of our lives. It is exercise and stress relief, and in a way a kind of prayer. The dunes are a reminder of transition, impermanence, and to see the wind made physical and tangible as it is written across the dune's face is awe inspiring. The natural sweeping bowls play with the wind, and the everpresent hawks and butterflies come to dance in their wells. The ridges switch and curl and resemble the backs of iguanas. Sometimes the wind is so strong we cannot board, we are held aloft by its buffett and are comically motionless at the dunes' peak.

We are becoming fairly good at this: this activity better suited to sixteen year olds has strengthened me and made me leaner, my skin and hair made golden by the sun and polished stingingly by occasional sandstorms.

More Lula stories: One; we drive to the now-open, now-closed road from Porto da Lagoa into Lagoa itself, to be assured by the road crew the way is open this morning. At the last turn, a pile of sand the size of a beer truck blocks both lanes. Two workers with shovels shrug and begin to dig a path through the steepest and most dense part of the new hill, nodding and smiling and thumbs-up in encouragement. When they have completed the narrow trough to their satisfaction, they wave us through. I shake my head, thinking both of the car's modest width and inadequate power. They are insistent. I drive forward, and we are of course stuck (and sinking) with no way to escape the car. The workers are mysteriously surprised, again shrug and begin the ten minute process of digging us clear.

Two: At the bottom of the same road, a small video store when we are starved for entertainment, Lula parked outside for perhaps 90 seconds. Our VCR-rental endevour fruitless, we return to the car to discover the rear tire punctured half a dozen times by the bored teenagers who lean incessantly against the payphone. Fortunately we manage to borrow a spare (our spare having been totalled in a previous adventure) and manage to replace the tire in Lagoa for only fifteen reais and a few hours time. Despite the ubiquitous incompetence and indifference, this is the only malice we have observed in this country.

A business trip with Philip to Sao Paulo. The hotel is Philip Starck, beautifully appointed but uniquely Brazilian in execution: exposed screws, unfinished plaster, light plates and cover panels askew.

Sao Paulo is Vancouver's Downtown East Side forever and ever and ever - East Hastings with thirteen million people. Broken windows, graffiti, needles and condoms and vinyl-booted whores, pawn shops. Security guards with oversized revolvers and gleaming brass ammunition, crude single barrelled shotguns, Belgian automatic rifles from the 1960s. Without end or relief or "good neighbourhoods". Everywhere the smell of sunbaked concrete and urine, exposed rebar and straw-yellow grass in the gutters.

Flying out of the city, some six or seven kilometres above, and you can see the curvature of the earth, domed by the lights of Sao Paulo - below an entire planet of traffic and crumbling apartment buildings.

It is a few days before Easter, the five hundredth birthday of Brasil, which celebrates in the traditional form of land reform riots in Rio and Sao Paulo and the military police shutting down the country. They are everywhere, these arrogant brownshirted whistleblowers, heavily armed. Ostensibly their role is security and traffic - roadblocks are random and ubiquitous. Cars are stopped and searched for their amusement. Corruption is the norm, rather than the exception. Fortunately they are under direct orders to ignore tourists. We repeatedly pretend to be American when dealing with them.

Our "mission" here is accomplished. We arrived here to brand the company and its projects, develop a strategy, write the business plan, obtain Venture Capital and forge an alliance with Yahoo. All in 75 days. We are weary, exhausted, ready to come home.

We breakfast in a small cafe down the road from our pousada, alongside the lagoon. The cafe is bright, with brave colours, blue and green and orange, with beautiful ironwork and tile and windows that open like doors to the road. It is our ideal of Brasil, the one with which we arrived - a Brasil of music and colour and fresh fruit, bright-eyed, eversmiling, dark-skinned helpful people who laugh at our broken language. It is the Brasil of perfect coffee and fresh pastries with tropical fruit, not the Brasil of cracked cement, gap-toothed drunks, homicidal drivers, litter and heroin-thin, ragged-eared dogs.

This too, is Brasil, to us. I will not make the tourist's mistake here of assuming I know anything of this country, in which I've lived for barely three months, and seen only two cities. But somewhere between the Carnaval posters and the brutal ugliness of the streets is a Brasil I will take with me. And of course now we have our passports to that secret nation of surf culture - an international fraternity of travel and tide and colour and music, adventure, activism, physical exhaustion and cultivated laziness, of being at once overwhelmed and welcomed by a nature greater than ourselves. It's flag is sewn from neoprene and hemp, wax and sand and salt and flowerprint cottons. It will serve, I think, as a kind of second home to us.