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.

I had taken my two friends to Minas Gerais to show them what I think too many foreign travelers like them miss: the Brazil that lies beyond the Christ on the hill in Rio, the eco-lodges of the Amazon and the model-flecked beaches of Florianópolis. Instead of a cross on a hill, Minas has colonial towns loaded with Baroque-style churches. Instead of vast rain forests, Minas has gorgeous mountains and countless waterfalls. And instead of beaches, it’s the home of a country cooking style famed across this nation of more than 190 million.

We started out on a Sunday from Rio de Janeiro, and made a four-hour drive north into the mountains to Tiradentes, one of many Baroque-church-studded colonial towns that had their glory days in the 18th century when Minas Gerais (“General Mines”) was a gold and diamond cash cow for the Portuguese crown.

Tiradentes is considered to be the most romantic of them, with cobblestone streets, painstakingly restored homes and churches, shops loaded with traditional local sweets and cheeses, and rows of intimate restaurants. If you’re thinking this is probably not the ideal spot for three single male travelers, you’re of one mind with Neil and Adam, who were particularly amused that I insisted on arriving in time for afternoon tea at Solar da Ponte, an inn where I had booked a room.

The mansionlike Solar da Ponte is owned by the British-Brazilian couple John and Anna Maria Parsons, who began restoring the place in the early 1970s. Common spaces are loaded with books and art, and our rooms fell in the sweet spot where elegantly rustic wood furniture meets magically modern mattresses. The manicured grounds house a family of tamarin monkeys, which every morning approach the windowsills of the dining room looking for (and getting) handouts.

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