Brazil has produced more world-champion Formula One drivers than any other nation. This is a curious distinction, since Brazilian roads are studded with lombadas—not a dirty dance but speed bumps the size and shape of half a culvert. Five or ten miles per hour is about all a lombada will permit, and villages rate their size by the number of lombadas they possess. When you see a warning sign that looks like a three-breasted bra, you know you’ve hit the big time. Just don’t hit it too hard, especially if you’re driving a slope-nosed, loaf-shaped Chrysler 300M sedan as belly-to-the-road as an armadillo.

Day One: 107 Miles —São Paolo to Ilhabela

São Paulo sprawls, spreads, clutters, and defiles, a Jabba the Hutt of cities. Yet by the time we’ve headed 30 miles down the highway toward the South Atlantic shore, the countryside is nothing but jungly greenery. Soon the road plunges down and down through a wet, mist-blanketed forest, giving up altitude rapidly as the superb Chrysler settles into a rhythm of tracking through a series of serpentine curves. The highway of choice to Rio is a four-lane toll road the equal of any rural interstate. But we’re on “the old road”—the winding coastal two-lane, parts of which were paved only recently. For miles there’s nothing but forest, then suddenly a couple of sushi bars, testament to the heavy Japanese presence in Brazil. And always the speed bumps, many overseen by cops in roadside shelters. Our destination is Ilhabela. And a bela island it is. It’s São Paulo’s Nantucket, where the populace grows eightfold in summer, to 100,000-plus, shuttled to the 30-mile-long, one-road island by a pair of little ferries. Two tankers swing at anchor in the windy strait between island and mainland, but later I’ll see a photo of that water paved with moored yachts. At Maison Joly, a bronze plaque announces that the king of Sweden beat us to the inn by seven months. From high on a hillside above town, the view from the terrace is magnetic. As the day plays into evening gloom, lightning-laced tropical squalls march across the strait from the mountains, and we bed down amid the flapping of banana leaves, the tankers visible only as floating necklaces of bright deck lights.

Day Two: 66 Miles —Ilhabela to Ubatuba

We wake to a raging rainstorm, the channel whitecapped. A nascent waterspout foams the water into a whirl of white, but it can’t quite grasp the clouds above. A loose sheet of tin roofing clatters in the wind, while crank-winged frigate birds somehow manage to soar serenely. The day’s drive is a struggle. Two-lane SP 055 is bordered by thick red mud and long stretches of shack-shops that advertise everything from tire-patching to satellite-dish repairing. Yet just inland from this foulness is untracked jungle abloom with impatiens, and mountainsides with waterfalls skeining down, spider monkeys and howlers hiding in the trees. Rain pelts the car in gusty bursts, and we’re suddenly in the middle of a mini-tornado, a whirl of branches and thatch marking its footprint. Power lines are sparking and whipping, an enormous Marlboro Man billboard is flat on its back next to the road, and we barely squeak past a just-fallen tree. It’s a relief to reach the Hotel Recanto das Toninhas, a pleasant little beach resort just outside Ubatuba, though when I unleash my pidgin Spanish and ask, “Una sala por una noche, por favor?” the desk clerk smiles sweetly and says, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak English.” Stray more than 50 feet from a city-hotel concierge in Brazil, and the world around you converses only in Portuguese. Don’t be surprised when “Sala? Zimmer? Chambre? Room?” don’t work with a desk clerk. None of them sound the slightest bit like quarto.

Day Three: 84 Miles —Ubatuba to Parati

From Ubatuba, SP 125 leads northward up the Serra do Mar to Taubaté, where it connects with the Rio-São Paulo highway. A Brazilian has told us that the road is worth a diversion—up to São Luis do Paraitingo and back down again—and he’s right. Unlike Alpine routes, this one makes no concession to gradient. There are switchbacks, but the road generally attacks as straight up as possible. It’s a 13-mile-long hill as steep as anything in San Francisco, and the view from the height seems to stretch halfway to Africa. Under every coastal Brazilian’s clothes is a bathing suit. My companion and I, however, require contortions in the Chrysler to use Itamambuca beach, one of dozens of turnoffs from SP 055 marked simply praia that lead to idyllic sweeps of South Atlantic sand. Pick one, any one, or go by the one- to three-star ratings in the excellent Quatro Rodas Guia Brasil tourist guide (hard to find in English, but lots of symbology makes the Portuguese version comprehensible). Parati is a strange, small jewel of a town, an oddity amid the beach culture that surrounds it. Filled with shops retailing folclórico crafts that all look as though they have come from Pier 1, the clutch of low, red-roofed buildings nonetheless seems like something out of the Andes. The Pousada do Santi is in a former mansion, and it apparently has a heavy film-biz trade from nearby Rio de Janeiro. Outside our room, hung on the restored walls, is a poster for Amor Alucinate, starring Harvey Keitel and Cameron Diaz in “una comédia de humor . . . negro!”

Day Four: 216 Miles —Parati to Petrópolis

The splendid parkway to Petrópolis, a small, historic city in the mountains north of Rio, is another vertiginous climb that challenges the 300M’s capabilities. But only slightly, for we’re behind a 253-horsepower, 3.5-liter multivalve V-6 engine that will, we’ll later find on a stretch of straight, empty highway, easily take the big Chrysler to 140. The 300M is a moderately sporty version of the Chrysler LHS, with stiffer suspension, less length, sharper steering, and a dual-mode automatic transmission that can be shifted up and down manually with a quick left or right flick of the “AutoStick.” Although some drivers will never again touch that function after playing with it for the first week of ownership, it allows an enthusiastic motorist to set up for passing without resorting to a coarse full-throttle kickdown shift and to deal gracefully with selecting the proper engine speed for maximum torque when exiting a corner. In Petrópolis, I make my airman’s pilgrimage to the house of Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian who was the world’s first true pilot. In 1898, more than five years before the Wright brothers flew under power, Santos-Dumont maneuvered his primitive powered blimp, Airship No. 1, over Paris. It was the first time anybody had ever actually flown where they wanted to, rather than simply floating at the behest of the breeze. The house, where Santos-Dumont lived in Petrópolis from 1918 until he died in 1932, is a tiny structure perched on a crag in the middle of town, little more than a large tree house—a library, bathroom, and small sleeping loft. The few exhibits, labeled in Portuguese, are largely incomprehensible to me. Even the one headed Aspectos de sua Sexualidade.

Day Five: 157 Miles —Petrópolis to Búzios

Brigitte Bardot and a Brazilian boyfriend “discovered” Búzios in the 1960s and made it the hideaway of Rio’s rich and infamous. The Trópico di Capricórnio, atop a knobby little hill outside town, is the place to stay if you don’t have your own mansion. Eight rooms, a swimming pool, and a bar with portholes that allow underwater thong-gazing at one’s leisure. A charming, lank-haired young French lad chats us up, notebook in hand. Laurent is scouting for his boss, an L.A. lawyer who plans to do a comfortable South American tour and needs nice digs. We show Laurent our small, $300-a-night room, but he thinks Mr. Big needs the $1,750 Trópico suite: fully stocked bar, Jacuzzi for eight, and a bed the size of a badminton court. Tomorrow it’s on to Rio—who can go to Brazil without visiting the most magnificently situated city on earth?—and a refutation of every warning I’ve been given about the country. “Don’t wear any jewelry,” I was cautioned. So I left my watch at home, even my wedding ring. “They’ll steal you blind,” I was told. So I’ve secreted money in a variety of pockets and purses. “Oh, and watch out for Brazilian drivers. They all think they’re Ayrton Senna, and the accident record is the worst in the world.” In fact, I find that somebody has done a Rudy Giuliani on this country. The only reminder of the former high crime rate is that throughout Brazil drivers ignore stop signs and red lights. “It is . . . tolerated,” an acquaintance tells us. “Because five years ago, in the big cities, they would put a gun to you and take your car away if you stopped. But no more.” And the drivers? I passed only one who was actually in a four-wheel drift. Maybe it’s the lombadas.

Behind the Wheel

The Chrysler 300M

Chrysler makes Detroit’s most underrated, underappreciated sedans. The $30,000 300M is a generation ahead of any other domestic in its class and on a par with European near-luxury sedans that cost a third again as much. It competes handily with Japanese cars that admittedly approach automotive perfection, but at the cost of cautious, bland styling and road manners—there’s nothing cautious or bland about the 300M. The image of the Chrysler nameplate, once synonymous with big, high-performance, well-engineered luxury cars, was badly tarred by Lee Iacocca: He saved the company from bankruptcy, but at the cost of building its luxury cars on a shoddy platform and tarting them up with flashy styling cues. The 300M and its less aggressive though identically powered stablemate, the LHS, come in splendidly styled bodies that make other domestics look sadly dated. The 300M’s sleek, ready-to-pounce, forward-thrusting shape is also an ergonomic marvel, allowing for interior room greater than what you’d expect from a “five-meter car”—a designation of its length that marks the 300M as fit for European streets and garages as well as our own. And the power plant is an excellent new all-aluminum, four-valve-per-cylinder, overhead-cam V-6 engine every bit as good as any V-6 from Europe or Japan. In fact, of the more than two dozen sixes on the U.S. market, only two—the 296-horsepower Porsche flat six and the dual-overhead-cam, twin turbo, 300-horsepower V-6 in the Mitsubishi 3000 sports car—are more powerful. In the wake of Iacocca, $30,000 for a Chrysler today seems expensive to some shoppers. In fact, it’s something of a bargain.