Journey With a Baja Burro (Sunbelt Cultural Heritage Books) [Paperback]

Graham Mackintosh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2000 | Series: Sunbelt Cultural Heritage Books

The humorous and informative story of adventure traveler Graham Mackintosh's thousand mile walk from the U.S. border to Loreto, site of the first successful mission in the Californias. The peninsula, seen from the pace and perspective of this Englishman and his burro, offers unique insight into its early mission history and the burgeoning tourist explosion impacting one of the world's greatest wilderness areas.

Editorial Reviews

Review

REVIEWS After writing Into a Desert Place…Mackintosh returns with this account of his 1000-mile journey by burro from the California border to the oldest established mission in Loreto, located in the southern part of the Baja peninsula. Along the way, he describes the land, the people he meets, the missions he visits, and his travails with the burro. The book is well written and generally keeps the reader's interest. --Library journal

Mackintosh has the uncanny ability to take you with him step by step on a lively adventure through Baja, mixing history with daily recollections. He has also managed, early on, to inject enough tension into the story -- the recalcitrance of an obstinate burro and the concerns of a new bride felt abandoned -- to drive the story forward and maintain its legitimacy as a page turner. Better than most, Mackintosh has done his homework. It is a wonderful book, even better than his first (Into a Desert Place), thoroughly enjoyable, well edited and a joyful read for anyone who wants to know and understand that terribly fickle lady called Baja. --Fred Hoctor - Western Outdoor News

This wonderful adventure held this sentimental "ass" spellbound and joyfully teary-eyed from start to finish. We defy any reader to remain dry eyed while the author struggles manfully himself to keep too much sentiment from the closing pages as he has to bid his beloved burro farewell. As we travel with Mackintosh and Misión, we realize there is a lot more to a donkey than we could have ever known. If you haven't already, you absolutely must read this incredible story. Mackintosh is a spiritual person in the best sense. -- The Gringo Gazette --The Gringo Gazette

From the Publisher

"He was the best of burros; he was the worst of burros!" So opens the new book by Graham Mackintosh. Walking along trails, dirt roads, and highways, Graham and pack burro Mision traversed scorching desert and frigid pine-covered mountains to visit many of the mission sites along the way. From shaky beginnings came a profound and moving relationship. A humorous, entertaining, and often inspiring account packed with fascinating historical information.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Sunbelt Publications; 1st edition (November 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0932653413
• ISBN-13: 978-0932653413
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #633,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Graham Mackintosh was born in London in 1951 of a Scottish father (Inverness)and an Irish mother (Kilrush, Co. Clare), he grew up in Slough, Berkshire, and received a BA Hons degree in Sociology from the University of Leeds.

In 1983 he was a lecturer at a college in England teaching social sciences and special education to unemployed teenagers. Hoping to show his students that a shoestring expedition could be the adventure of a lifetime, Mackintosh, who described himself as the "least adventurous person in the world," set out to walk around the beautiful but dangerous coastline of Mexico's Baja California peninsula.

The near two-year, 3,000-mile trip changed his life. When Mackintosh emerged from the cactus-strewn wilderness, he returned to England to write Into a Desert Place and there received the prestigious "Adventurous Traveller of the Year" award.

After years promoting Into a Desert Place in the UK, the US and Baja California, in 1997 Graham Mackintosh elected to walk down the rugged, mountainous interior of Baja, visiting many of the old mission sites along the way. Journey with a Baja Burro, his second book, was the result. It describes his arduous thousand-mile journey with a pack burro from the US border to Loreto - a trip that began exactly 300 years after the October 1697 founding of the Loreto mission, the first permanent European settlement in the "Californias".

In the summer of 2001, he camped four months in Baja's highest mountain range, the Sierra San Pedro Mártir with two street dogs, Penny and Pedro, and that became the subject of his third book - Nearer My Dog to Thee.

His fourth book, Marooned With Very Little Beer, appeared in April 2008, and tells of his two months kayaking and hiking the second largest island in the Sea of Cortez - Isla Angel de la Guarda.

Graham Mackintosh now lives in San Diego, California. He continues to give lectures and slide shows on his adventures, writes articles on Baja and has guided tourists south of the border on various trips. He is married to Bonni, a nurse, who shares his love for Baja and for nature.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Older, perhaps Wiser Baja Journey, December 24, 2000

By 

Robert H. Nunnally Jr. "gurdonark" (Allen, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Journey With a Baja Burro (Sunbelt Cultural Heritage Books) (Paperback)

I had wondered for years whether Graham MacKintosh would write another Baja book. His Into a Desert Place sets a high standard as a down to earth everyman-on-a-journey walking exploration of the fascinating and yet physically challenging Baja peninsula.

This book resumes our acquaintance with Mr. Mackintosh in a much different place in life than Into a Desert Place. Rather than being a Brit teacher wholly inexperienced in Baja ways, he starts the book as a married San Diego "old Baja hand", veteran of many trips and no longer an initiate pilgrim to the ways of the desert peninsula. If the dialogue portions of the books are any guide, I'd guess his Spanish improved a good bit with time. His narrative style remains folksy, simple, intelligent and unadorned.

In Journey with a Baja Burro, Mr. Mackintosh takes a burro on a trek from Tecate, Mexico down to Loreto. His travel itinerary takes him past the many missions along the way, and he gives us interesting bursts of history about each.

One might imagine that such a work would merely mirror Into a Desert Place, but the intrigue here is that the author is a changed man, and his Baja has also irrevocably changed. We still see the down to earth narrative, the simple punning, and the flights into spiritual self-exploration that make the first work so down to earth and yet such a flight of fancy. But here we have a bit of the drama of day to day living that the itinerant wanderer faces when he is no longer 25, and his family waits, rather impatiently, at home. We all grow a bit older, and the beckoning of the open sky tempers for some of us with time--but perhaps not for Mr. Mackintosh.

Mr. Mackintosh's gift is that although he understands that some of what he does is quite remarkable, he also understands the personal frailties that he brings to his courageous expeditions. This book is not the work that Into a Desert Place is, because the author, Baja, and perhaps the world itself is no longer quite the same. But this is a charming return to a alternative by-lane away from the great superhighway of suburban life, and I urge you to put on your turn signal for a walk with Mr. Mackintosh's burro at your earliest convenience. You need not read Into a Desert Place to love this one, but if you read this one first, I'm betting you'll go back and pick up the first one next.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Journey With a Baja Burro, February 28, 2001

By 

Ann O'Neil (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Journey With a Baja Burro (Sunbelt Cultural Heritage Books) (Paperback)

JOURNEY WITH A BAJA BURRO is a gem of a book. Graham Mackintosh has written of his walk with his burro Mision through the mountains and deserts of the Baja California peninsula so vividly and poetically that it comes alive in our minds. His relationship with his sometimes-exasperating animal companion is funny and touching. Reading JOURNEY WITH A BAJA BURRO will teach you a lot about this relatively unknown Mexican peninsula which extends a thousand miles below the border of California, and you'll have a lot of fun on the journey.

Ann O'Neil, Longtime Baja California resident and author of "Loreto, Baja California: First Mission and Capital of Spanish California"

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A man, a mission, some wonderful moments., May 21, 2002

By 

Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Journey With a Baja Burro (Sunbelt Cultural Heritage Books) (Paperback)

Fourteen years after his trek around the coast of Baja California, Mackintosh, now a San Diego family man, is again drawn from the common world to a most uncommon journey. This time trekking southward in mountainous inland Baja with a pack burro. [I have had the great pleasure of meeting Graham Mackintosh and talking with him about his earlier book and about this one. For what it's worth, I found him to be the same gentle pilgrim that we meet in his writings.] "There was something very compelling and liberating about surrendering... From now on there would be no Mitsubishi, no Microsoft, no modem, no modern world, and maybe no home or wife -- just [the burro] and me, my goal, my God, and the good, simple people of Baja California," muses Mackintosh in a moment of introspective single-mindedness. Something that I enjoy about his observations, thoughts, and interests, if how often they closely resemble my own; one example being his delight in the company of a certain species of bird which I also particularly enjoy -- and which never fails to exhibit and inspire a certain indescribable joy -- the black phoebe.
As in his earlier book, Into A Desert Place, frequently recurring samplings of the history of Baja (and Alta) California, including the accomplishments and abuses of the Spanish missionaries, are well related and seamlessly augment the story. Mackintosh labels himself 'a poor Christian and a worse Catholic' and, for this reader, many of the books finer moments center in the author's spiritual questionings, insights, struggles, perhaps heresies, visionary experiences, and graceful redemptions. "Behind the cool, hard, smooth rock, I sensed that there was another reality close at hand. That's how far I had come! I had seen the solid, indubitable forms of the great mountains and valleys dissolve into extraordinary visions; and at times I had almost felt myself dissolving into the world... I sensed it wasn't just an illusion. For a few precious moments, I had been freed from my hobbles. I had looked and stepped beyond... The journey... seemed, in part, a vital preparation for a much bigger journey to come."