By SETH KUGEL
Published: October 25, 2009

THE map showed two obvious ways to get from Catas Altas, a sleepy village in the foothills of southeast Brazil, to our hotel at Serra do Cipó National Park, a highland steppe with vertiginous canyons and cave paintings. There was the wimpy way, a roundabout route that would take us over smooth asphalt and trusty highways. And then there was the manly path: a direct shot along rutted dirt roads that wound through lazy towns like Taquaraçu de Minas and Jaboticatubas.

I couldn’t blame my travel companions, Adam and Neil, writer friends from New York City, for leaning towards taking the easier route. Our rental car, a silver Chevy Prisma with a low-hanging chassis, wasn’t exactly fit for dusty rural shortcuts. But we were in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where bumping along dirt roads is part of the thrill. So straight ahead we went.

The first stretch took us through green pastures and cornfields demarcated with fences made from barbed wire and jagged wooden stakes. Then, around one bend, a whitewashed, red-tile-roofed mansion appeared like a mirage in the dust. Curious, we pulled up, wandered through the out-of-place manicured lawn and found a gentleman farmer from the city examining his banana orchards. Rather than shoot us for trespassing, he invited us in for coffee and homemade guava paste.

For me, that was a typical moment in Minas Gerais, Brazil’s second-most populous state but considered by many to be its rural heartland.

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