Way off the beaten track in Brazil’s diamond country

Rain pummelled the roof of my tent, the sound mingling with the thunder of a nearby waterfall. After 10 days on the trail I had no clothes that weren’t damp and stinking. Ticks and mosquitoes had besieged my arms and legs. I lay in the dripping dark, wondering how it had come to this. Once upon a time, luxury travel was about gold taps and chocolates on the pillow. Of course, the genre has widened to include ever more exclusive and unusual experiences — but physical discomfort and insect bites were never part of the equation. 

I first encountered Gift of Go through its sprawling, lavishly illustrated website, which pitched the company as something of an antidote to a travel industry dedicated to commodifying adventure. Rather than selling “carefully crafted authenticity and readily collectible ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experiences” this new company promised “true stories” and “the most compelling journeys on earth” — albeit at sky-high prices.

Gift of Go is the creation of Eddie Lott, 43, a Texan, and his wife Elisa Oliveira, 32, travel-industry newcomers based in the small town of Diamantina in northern Minas Gerais. Launched this year after three years of research and planning, the company’s trips include a 28-day expedition on foot and horseback in Brazil’s Serra do Espinhaço — a vast and little-visited mountain wilderness in the former diamond-mining region of Minas Gerais. Guests camp or stay in village houses, and pay a very luxurious-sounding $2,000 per person, per day, for the privilege.  

Towards the end of 2023 I interviewed the couple several times by Zoom. Little did I know that in fact it was me who was being assessed — for my state of health, level of trekking experience, and general suitability to join them as a guinea pig on a condensed version of their 28-day trip, entitled “Diamonds/Wild Tales + Lost Trails”. Condensed it might be, but it was still a two-week journey through some very tough terrain indeed. 

Then the packing list arrived. It spoke volumes, but also opened up whole new vistas of doubt and trepidation. Sleeping mats, headlamps and heavy-duty bug sprays were all required. Clothes were to be soaked in liquid permethrin, a powerful insect repellent, to ward off ticks. Much of the modern language of hiking gear was foreign to me, but there were words even I could recognise — like “snakes”. A pair of wraparound gaiters for protection against the region’s venomous serpents, which tend to attack at shin-level, was apparently essential.  

I flew in to São Paulo and took a connecting flight to Belo Horizonte, state capital of Minas Gerais, where Lott and Oliveira picked me up for the four-hour drive north to Diamantina. For 200 years during the Portuguese colonial era this small town was a global centre of the diamond trade. The rivers of northern Minas were dredged for gold and precious stones using slave labour, these riches being funnelled directly into the coffers of the Portuguese crown. With the final decline of the local diamond trade in the late 20th century, the region fell into grinding rural poverty and chronic depopulation.

What remains is its huge and almost entirely unexploited natural landscape. Today the conservation areas of the Serra do Espinhaço include a national park, various state parks and other reserves, adding up to more than 150,000ha of protected land. Our great trek’s (very roughly) circular route would take us south and east out of Diamantina into the back country along the Jequitinhonha river valley, moving up into the highlands of Rio Preto State Park and plunging into the immensity of Sempre Vivas National Park before looping back towards Diamantina and civilisation. This was, explained Lott, not only among the most sparsely populated regions anywhere in Brazil, but had almost no tourist infrastructure either.

Early on an April morning we left São Gonçalo do Rio das Pedras, a low-rise colonial village where a rustic pousada would be the last conventional accommodation I’d be seeing for a while, heading into wide-open country where white sand trails once used by mule-riding tropeiros (commercial travellers) meandered between rocky uplands. Accompanying us was Julio Brabo, a local geologist, geographer and trail guide with a wide-ranging knowledge of the Serra do Espinhaço in all its grandeur and complexity. Understanding these surroundings meant learning from Brabo about the various biomes we’d be traversing, such as mata atlântica, the broadleaved forest typical of southern and eastern Brazil, and cerrado, a rocky savannah of tremendous biodiversity. 

After a long wet summer a blazing sun had kick-started the Serra into exuberant life. The cerrado was exploding in blasts of purple, yellow, white, and Barbie pink. By the side of the trail lay a bunch of small white sempre-viva flowers with a button-like shape and long thin stems, seemingly left there to dry. Sempre-viva is highly valued by the international floristry trade, said Brabo, and gathering the flowers provides a source of revenue for the hardscrabble rural communities on the outer edges of the Serra.

Our walking fell into a quick, steady rhythm. The four of us moved ahead in single file, scrambling up rough hillsides of quartzite rock, fording streams and picking through boggy meadows. As we went, Lott told me tales of his days as a backpacking wanderer in Central and South America, his recycling business in Dallas, Texas, and his career as a singer-songwriter (his 2015 album “Blame It On My Wild Soul” is still streaming on Spotify). Oliveira, an architect by training, was born and raised in Minas Gerais.

Lott had driven through the region in 2013 and, when he stopped at a gas station, took a photo of the lush green surroundings. When the image popped up as an automated “memory” on his phone a few years later, he decided to return to explore. “That was the start of my relationship with the Espinhaço,” he says. “It was hard going, but amazing and beautiful. It was so remote. And best of all, there was nobody here.”

From the top of Pico do Raio at 1,405 metres, massive views stretched to a bluish horizon. The silence up here was deep and viscous. Flocks of yellow and black swallowtail butterflies fluttered ecstatically around the summit. After a hard climb my breath came in gasps, my heart thumping over billows of nausea. If this was described in the itinerary as an “easy” 25km day, I reflected nervously, how on earth would I cope with a difficult one?

The answer would come soon enough. Out in this untrammelled wilderness there would be moments of exhaustion, but also of exhilaration, such as I’d never known in a lifetime of travel. Some nights we slept in tents in forest clearings or on white-sand river beaches. Other times our lodgings were dirt-floored adobe houses in remote hamlets. Especially when the going got tough, I privately wondered about Gift of Go’s business model and its potential clientele — both willing and able to take on this spartan travel regime, and happy to pay for it to the tune of $2,000 a day, or even more for the bespoke trips on offer. For many years Lott had had in mind the idea of offering “transformative journeys” in off-the-map places. The course he took at the Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS), a survival-skills centre in the Utah desert where he shared water rations with multi-millionaire executives, suggested there might be a niche market for this kind of hardcore adventure tourism.

Day five was a 31k monster. After reveille at 4am and a breakfast of sweet black coffee and biscuits, we set off along a valley where giant mango trees stood like oaks and humpbacked cattle grazed the verdant meadows. Grey crags in phantasmagorical, eroded forms thrust themselves out of the landscape; up ahead loomed the forbidding, flat-topped peak of Itambé (2052 metres).

“Where in Europe does this scene remind you of?” asked Lott. I racked my brain, but his question went unanswered. Everything here was new and strange; nothing lay within my frame of reference.

A rushing sound in the distance might be one of two things: a breeze blowing through the waving indaiá palms, or a fast-flowing river with waters whose natural tannins stained them the colour of Coca-Cola. Sometimes we’d stop beside one of these rivers to sling off our backpacks, fill up our water bottles, and nibble on Brazilian trail food like banana bars and biscoitinho, a weirdly addictive tapioca puff.

Dusk was falling when we pitched up at the house of Santos Evaristo and Maria da Conceiçao Aguiar, an elderly couple belonging to the Espinhaço’s ever-decreasing population of subsistence farmers. From the valley bottom came the rumble of a waterfall. At the farmhouse Maria bustled barefoot around her earth-floored kitchen. On a wood-fired range sat bubbling pans of frango caipira (chicken stew), costelinha (braised pork ribs), fried okra, beans, and the polenta-like maize porridge angú — the ribsticking repertoire of traditional mineiro cooking. Ravenous with hunger, we piled our tin plates high while Santos, wearing a battered cowboy hat and a grizzled moustache, handed round jam jars full of home-made cachaça.

We would need all the sustenance we could get. Jewel in the crown of northern Minas’ conservation areas is the mighty Sempre Vivas National Park, which covers an area the size of Los Angeles but whose inhabitants could be counted (said Lott) on the fingers of two hands. It was here, I found, that the demands of the trek were at their harshest. In the taquaral, a dense bamboo forest at the heart of the park, the trails had grown over and Lott began bushwhacking to left and right with a machete like a real-life Indiana Jones. Careful with the unha de gato, said Oliveira: the fearful spines of the “cat’s claw” creeper can rip your flesh open. Despite the permethrin, clumps of tiny ticks had begun to appear around my waist and thighs.

Unlike the usual run of high-end adventure operators, Gift of Go doesn’t do glamping, Aman-style luxe-in-the-middle-of-nowhere, or surprise-and-delight dinners with white linen tablecloths in stunning locations. (Though Lott’s veggie risotto, cooked on a calor-gas burner poised on a boulder, wasn’t bad at all.) Bathing possibilities were reduced (or increased) to a dip in the river. Toilet facilities involved wandering a discreet distance from the camp with a trowel in hand, keeping a weather eye out for snakes.

Yet there were many compensations. Various sections of the trek were undertaken on mules and horses provided by local cowboys, and one evening we made a memorable four-hour descent from the high plains of Sempre Vivas to the village of Curimataí, my sure-footed mule picking its way down a perilous stony gorge under a refulgent moon.   

Another great pay-off was chasing waterfalls. The Serra do Espinhaço is prodigal in the number and magnificence of its cachoeiras or waterfalls, some of which are so inaccessible they may not have been visited for years. At one nameless wonder, reached by a tortuous trail through thick scrub, we clambered down to lounge at the base of the falls, awestruck by the water’s howling roar and the savage beauty of this lost world.

In the mud-spattered settlement of Quartéis we spent our last night on the fringes of the Espinhaço. In our two weeks of tramping the trails of the Serra, extraordinary as it seemed, we’d seen not a single fellow traveller. This was the land that not only time, but also tourism, had forgotten.

We stumbled back into Diamantina on a Saturday night when the town was brimful of visitors for the Vesperata, a festival with local bandsmen playing from the balconies. Feeling out of place in our sweaty, grimy clothes, we wandered the cobbled streets, thinking how overdressed and overfed these party people looked and how the Espinhaço’s ragged, rugged wilderness already seemed half a world away.

I would miss our little gang of four. Lott and Oliveira plan to maintain the intimate, hands-on vibe of their fledgling company, guiding the trips in person and keeping guest numbers down to a single individual or small group. But what about the price? Is this simply a company selling backpacking to the very well-off? While admitting the rates might be “uncommon”, Lott argues they are fair given the client/staff ratio and remote locations. Each trip has five full-time staff and between five and 15 more part-time helpers, horsemen, cooks and so on. “Each one is highly personalised and crafted — and we only guide very few per year.” For Gift of Go’s next phase he is turning his attention to two more of the world’s untouristed places: the Darién Gap on the Panama/Colombia border, and the lonely deserts of Big Bend Country where south west Texas bumps up against northern Mexico. 

Certainly this trek in the Brazilian highlands had been unlike any journey I’d undertaken. The challenges it posed had left me tired and four kilos lighter than when I’d started, but there was also a deep satisfaction and a new confidence in my capacity for physical endurance. I thought of those Shakespeare plays where characters go into a wood and emerge lightly bruised by their adventures, but permanently wiser.

Paul Richardson was a guest of Gift of Go (thegiftofgo.com)

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Letter in response to this article:

Same travel formula — willing buyer, willing seller / From Cynthia Miyashita, Gatika, Biscay, Spain