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 in the Espinhaço 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 relationships with the people who live along it, learning their histories and the rhythms of daily life.
Each of our trips is the product of that work: original routes through working landscapes, guided alongside the men and women 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
There wasn’t a single moment that started Gift of Go. It 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.
Brazil was always going to be part of that. Elisa was born and raised here in Minas Gerais, and I’d lived and traveled in the country off and on for more than two decades. We both understood how little of Brazil’s story was shared beyond its borders: its past and present, its vastness and beauty, its resilience and sense of community, its ways of life and the perspectives they carry.
Elisa and I had met in the Espinhaço, and we understood how clearly—and vividly—the range held so much of that story: quiet colonial-era towns and living quilombola communities; working high savannah and Atlantic Forest landscapes; large-scale mining and subsistence farming; rural poverty and urban wealth.
We moved to the range full-time in 2021 and began the work of understanding the range well enough to share it with others—documenting it, connecting its historic paths, building relationships across the range, and creating the structure that would eventually 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.
Elisa and I recently sat down with writer Paige McClanahan for a long conversation about the Espinhaço, travel, storytelling, and how Gift of Go came to be.
New friends. Cemitério do Peixe
If the Espinhaço is calling, we’re happy to talk it through.