What to Expect
True Stories. Real Adventure.
What You Can Expect from a GOGO Itinerary
There are a few things that don’t change on a GOGO trip: big days outside, rustic wood-fired meals, unforgettable homestays, and very few other tourists. Whether you’re joining us on a solo Journey, a small-group Expedition, or a Bespoke Trip with your own circle, you can expect the same core ingredients: original routes, founders in the field, active days, honest comfort, and a level of immersion that’s hard to find elsewhere.
“… More adventure each day than most people have their whole lives.”
- Neil Bolton, Traveler
trailhead, Sempre Vivas National Park (October)
Motion-filled Days
If you’re hoping to get outside and really experience the natural beauty of Brazil, you’re in the right place. The Serra do Espinhaço is a wonderland for active travelers, and our itineraries are built to make the most of it.
It’s not just that trekking, horseback riding, overlanding, and paddling are some of the most fulfilling ways we know to move through a place — they’re often the only ways to get from point A to point B. If you’re joining us on a Bespoke Trip, activities, pace, and daily mileage will be tuned to your group’s preferences. If you’re joining one of our Expeditions or a Journey, you should expect long, highly active days — often with 15–25 km on foot or horseback and significant elevation change over varied mountain terrain.
Arriving in good physical condition is always a good idea, but you don’t need to be a seasoned trekker or elite athlete to enjoy our trips. In our experience, the travelers who thrive here are those who like a challenge, are curious about the world around them, and enjoy living each day fully.
Trail Conditions (October)
Empty Trails
Three centuries of movement. Years of rediscovery.
The Espinhaço backcountry is a hidden world, and its labyrinth of little-used trails is the key. We’ve spent years exploring, documenting, and guiding along these paths — linking peaks, villages, waterfalls, and valleys — and most days we have them almost entirely to ourselves.
Outside a handful of state parks (which can fill up with locals on certain weekends and holidays), it’s rare to meet other folks on the trail. Expect to be captivated by the natural scenery along the trail, and often by the nature of the trails themselves, but don’t expect to see many other trekking poles.
Morning Shower / spiritual Experience
Daily Waterfall Baths
Take it from us: attempting to count the waterfalls of the Espinhaço is an exercise in futility. Just as futile: trying to spend consecutive days on the trail without bathing in one.
We typically cross paths with at least one named falls per day — and often many more — during our trips, from quiet, cola-colored cascades to show-stopping, white-sand-beach masterpieces, and everything in between.
“Ice-cold” has never felt so good.
Hoofing it on the Chapada do Couto (September)
Highland Riding
If you’ve ever dreamed of steadying a sturdy steed through brush, rivers, and rocky mountain passes in the Brazilian hinterlands, this is your chance.
Few places on earth lend themselves so readily to time in the saddle as the steep and spectacular serras southeast of Diamantina, even for first-timers. More experienced riders may prefer the remote campos and the wet, wild river valleys of the Berço. Prefer to gallop between waterfalls? Big-sky vistas and mile after mile of open dirt road in the Sertão beckon.
Riding is almost always optional on Expeditions and Journeys (we take riders’ experience and appetite into account), but it’s never frivolous: if you find yourself in the saddle, it’s because logistics — or legs — call for it. On Bespoke trips, some travelers ride for a single, unforgettable day; others weave horses through whole itineraries.
Either way, there’s usually a moment when you look up from the trail, feel the horse moving beneath you, and realize you’re crossing the range the way folks around here have done for centuries.
Fording the Rio Pardo (September)
Exhilarating Backroads
There is “off-roading”, and then there are the backroads of the Serra do Espinhaço, where washboarded dirt tracks, jagged rocks, seasonal marshes, white-sand stretches, and the occasional crater are all part of the commute. Out here, overlanding isn’t a weekend hobby. It’s how people get from one place to another.
Our vehicle of choice is the legendary Toyota Bandeirante, a “jipe” (actually a J40 Land Cruiser sibling) as famous for its backcountry prowess and iconic good looks as it is for its rough ride and unwieldy steering.
From the passenger seat, your job description is simple: hold on, look out the window, and let the landscape roll past.
As your captain speaking, we recommend you relax and enjoy the ride.
Cave Camping, Sempre Vivas National Park (October)
A Night in the Wild
Quaint pousadas and charming homestays connect us to the Espinhaço’s culture and history, but it wouldn’t quite be a GOGO trip without at least one night that feels further out. We prefer starry skies, soft sand, warm fires, and gently rolling streams, but we’re just as happy with the quiet of the mountains.
Simple wilderness campsites are often highlights of our Expeditions and Journeys: tents pitched under starlit skies, a fire going, boots drying somewhere nearby, and the sounds of the cerrado at night. On Bespoke trips, camping is optional; if sleeping out in the elements isn’t your idea of a good time, there are plenty of ways to stay in village houses and small inns and still feel — and be — far from everyday life.
Janta! Capivarí
Rustic Wood-Fired Meals
Tropeiro. Torresmo. Frango com quiabo. If you’re unfamiliar with comida mineira (the much-beloved regional cuisine of Minas Gerais), you will be by the end of the trip, and Brazilians everywhere will be jealous. In the Espinhaço, angu, freshly baked quitandas, and queijos made and cured just around the bend sit alongside Brazilian standards — rice, beans, locally grown fruits and vegetables, and locally raised meats.
Whether you’re on an Expedition, a Journey, or a Bespoke Trip, it’s likely we’ll arrive, again and again, to generous plates of wood-fired, home-cooked meals, stirred in heavy cast-iron pots on fogões a lenha in the backcountry, with more sophisticated menus waiting in Diamantina and a few other front-country towns.
There are almost always ice-cold beers within reach: Kaiser, Antarctica, and whatever else the local bar is proud of, plus a splash of cachaça here and there “for digestion.” Most of us abandon our weight-loss goals by about day three.
It’s worth it.
Bom apetite!
World’s Greatest host
WelcomIng Folks
Minas Gerais is Brazil’s heartland, and mineiros (the state’s denizens) play the part of heartland hosts to a “T”. Easy-going, down-to-earth, famously chatty, and never far from a good cup of coffee or cachaça, they are to “friendly” what paulistas (residents of São Paulo) are to “fast-paced” and cariocas (folks from Rio) are to “care-free”.
We don’t usually come across big crowds on our trips, but the people you do meet are likely to be mineiros: farmers, flower pickers, entrepreneurs, cowboys, homestay hosts, and kids on their way to or from school. Generally speaking, you’d be hard-pressed to find a kinder, more welcoming bunch anywhere in Brazil.
Maria & Santo’s House, Bica d’Agua
Unforgettable Homestays
Doorways into the world around us.
The trails will challenge you, and the peaks and waterfalls will leave you in awe, but in our experience it’s the time spent breaking bread with local families — sometimes well into the night — that often provides the most enriching and memorable moments of a trip. It’s impossible to come away unmoved by the foreign, often rustic conditions and the resilient, welcoming spirit of the households we visit.
As if good company, unique accommodations, and home-cooked meals weren’t reason enough, it helps to know that our stays provide meaningful income for families whose livelihoods have shifted with the decline of mining, and that they help sustain a culture that values the region’s overlooked history, languages, and landscapes.
We sleep in all sorts of memorable places — from historic inns and simple ranches to remote refuges and wilderness camps. We’re willing to bet that, years from now, it’ll be the homestays that still cross your mind.
Aprés-Trek celebration (July)
Joyous Evenings
We believe life should be celebrated after the sun goes down — especially when the days are as demanding and exhilarating as they tend to be on our trips — and you won’t find a more willing group of celebrators than the inhabitants of the Espinhaço’s tiny backcountry communities.
Community festas (especially around holy days in August and September — the smaller the town, the bigger the festa) are their own high-spirited universe, but in our experience there’s often nothing more satisfying or memorable than breaking bread, raising a glass, and sharing long conversations with the people who host us each night.
The journey is long, and the high-savannah night sky is a sight to behold.
Here’s to all of it, and to life in the Serra do Espinhaço.
Long Day, Mendanha
Well-Earned Sleep
We’ve learned that the more ambitious the itinerary, the more glorious the sleep. Travelers on our Journeys and Expeditions should expect plenty of quality shut-eye, regardless of how exotic the place is where you put your head down.
There’s nothing quite like a demanding, beautiful day on the trail, followed by a good meal, a bit of celebration, and a piping hot wood-fired shower, to put your mind at ease and your body at rest.
Even when creature comforts are simple, you may find you’ve rarely slept so deeply or so easily.
vesperata! Diamantina (April)
A Vesperata
Every so often, the range reminds you that Brazil isn’t just quiet trails and kitchen tables.
In Diamantina, that reminder has a name: “Vesperata” — a nighttime, open-air concert where the historic streets turn into an amphitheatre and the hometown band plays from balconies and windows above. Down on the cobblestones, folks from across Minas and beyond sit at small café tables, talk over one another, and look up.
If the dates line up, we usually fold a Vesperata into the journey — often near the end, when spirits are high, legs are pleasantly tired, and the city’s music can wash over the week. Samba, bossa nova, and Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) are staples, as are the occasional Beatles cover and sing-along wedding-band rock tune that everyone somehow knows the words to.
We can’t promise a Vesperata on every departure; the calendar belongs to the town, not to us. When it does line up, though, it’s one of the most joyous nights we know: a UNESCO World Heritage city, a sea of brass and voices, and the sense that the whole range has come out to say boa noite before you go.
There isn’t a party on earth where we’d rather celebrate the final night of a trip.
Brazil, All to ourselves (April)
Few (If Any) Other International Travelers
Few places on earth are remarkable enough to earn a single coveted UNESCO designation. The Espinhaço has three (the World Heritage city of Diamantina, the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve, and a rare Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System recognition for sempre-vivas flower pickers), yet it remains virtually anonymous, even within Brazil.
Part of that anonymity comes from the fact that Brazil itself is dramatically under-visited, receiving far fewer international visitors (just six million in 2023) than you’d expect for a country of its size and richness. Even within that context, the Espinhaço is an outlier. Far from the country’s major cities and famous coastline, the range has always required a journey simply to reach, let alone to explore.
It’s a privilege to experience such a remarkable place as it is, right now.
Spiritual Moment / Before the swim (October)
Sound Like Your Kind of Trip?
Read back over this page:
Anonymous landscapes and lost historic trails.
Long, motion-filled days over challenging terrain.
Ice-cold waterfall baths. Rustic, wood-fired meals and nights in the wild.
Humble homestays and dressed-down backcountry festas.
A quietly brilliant UNESCO city. Few international travelers.
Wedding-band rock tunes at the end of an arduous journey.
If you’re still with us after a list like that — and it feels more like relief than sacrifice — there’s a good chance you’d really like our trips.
We’ll be running four Expeditions in 2026–27, plus a small number of Journeys and Bespoke trips. Our trips aren’t for everyone. But for the right traveler, they’re gifts of a lifetime.
[Talk with Eddie about 2026–27 →]