About Us
The Work
We guide long-form journeys through places that haven’t been turned into tourism yet, moving at the pace the story requires.
Our inaugural Collection unfolds in Brazil’s Serra do Espinhaço, a little-visited mountain range in Minas Gerais that Elisa and I began exploring in 2018 and have called home since 2021.
All of our trips follow original routes shaped through years of place-based research and fieldwork. We trace little-used and historic paths—studying them in advance, then walking and rewalking them until they begin to make sense on the ground.
Before a route is ever mapped, we build and nurture relationships with the people who live along it, learning their histories and the rhythms of daily life.
Over time, that work comes together as crossings: routes through working landscapes, guided alongside crews composed of people who know the range best.
The result is a style of travel that is immersive, demanding, and revealing, built for travelers who value depth, narrative, and stewardship over spectacle.
Field Trip #1. Santa Bárbara
How This Became Our Life
Gift of Go grew out of a lifetime of travel, and a desire to share the stories of places we felt deeply drawn to, and that remained largely overlooked. There wasn’t a single moment that started it. Just years of living, working, and wandering abroad, and the slow accumulation of what those experiences left behind.
Brazil was always going to be part of that. Elisa was born and raised here, and I’d lived here off and on for more than two decades. Between us, it was familiar ground, but it was also clear how little of it is shared beyond the places where it’s lived: its vastness and beauty, its resilience and sense of community, its ways of life that are quietly disappearing, and what can be learned from them.
When I first visited the Serra do Espinhaço in 2018, I was struck by how clearly the range held so many of the country’s defining threads at once: colonialism and slavery; high savannah and Atlantic Forest; the meeting of northeast and southeast cultures; extraction, agriculture, and commerce; poverty and wealth.
Elisa and I met here not long after. In the years that followed, we began the work of understanding the range well enough to share it. That meant documenting it, connecting its historic paths, building relationships across the range, and shaping the structure that would allow us to guide travelers through it with continuity and depth.
Gift of Go is the result of organizing our lives around that work. To share the story of Brazil as truthfully and profoundly as we can, and to let the experiences themselves do the rest.
On the trail. São Gonçalo do Rio das Pedras
On the road. Fazenda Burití
New Friends. CEmitério do Peixe
If the Espinhaço is calling, we’re happy to talk it through.