Product Description

Mackintosh, an Englishman, fell in love with Baja California on a visit and, despite a glaring shortage of both experience and money, determined to walk its entire coast. This book is his account of how he equipped himself, what he saw and learned, and how he survived on this harsh and beautiful journey. Photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #319946 in Books
• Published on: 1995-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
Englishman Graham Mackintosh seems an unlikely candidate to walk the 3,000-mile coast of Baja, California--after all, he calls himself "the most unadventurous person in the world." Yet Mackintosh spent 500 days in that loneliest of deserts, carrying his world on his back, dining on rattlesnake and cactus, drinking distilled seawater, and living with fear as a constant companion. So, just what was this "most unadventurous" man doing in a place like Baja? In Into A Desert Place, Mackintosh blames books for his transformation from armchair traveler to hardened adventurer. A taste for adventure travel literature soon developed into an addiction; when the library shelves had surrendered the last of their treasures, he went into a kind of withdrawal: "It got so bad that I even thought of doing something adventurous and crazy myself.... " Walking around Baja was not Mackintosh's first choice--he considered getting married--but a trip to visit friends in Los Angeles led him to the little Mexican village of Ensenada, which had been prominently featured in one of those adventure travel tales he'd read in England.

Like Tolkein's Bilbo Baggins, running down the road toward adventure without a hat or coat, Mackintosh set off to Baja without a tent or sleeping bag, hitchhiking his way around the peninsula until his money ran out. By that time, he'd fallen deeply in love with the harsh environment and was determined to come back and explore it more thoroughly. Into a Desert Place is his account of what he saw and learned on that second trip, and how he survived.

Review
An engagingly humorous and ultimately inspiring chronicle of high adventure. (Stockton Record )

Could well become an enduring classic. . . . Always vastly entertaining, this is one of the finest pieces of travel writing to appear in years and certainly one of the best books on Baja ever published. Don't miss this title; it's that good. (Coast Book Review Service )

What has resulted from [Graham Mackintosh's] unsuspected determination and stamina is a truly uplifting account of what one person alone against the world can accomplish. It is also one of the finest pieces of travel writing of recent times. (Irish Independent )

[A] 'can't-wait-to-turn-the-page' story. (San Diego Log )

About the Author
Graham Mackintosh gives numerous lectures and radio and television interviews in both Britain and the United States.

Customer Reviews

The Triiumph of the Ordinary
Travel books about daring trips to places filled with hardships erupt like volcanic ash from the "featured on sale" sections of bookstores. Authors fill the shelves, as they have for a dozen decades, with endless sagas of how they climbed-a-mountain-and-everybody-died, why they sailed-the-Pacific-in-a-sea-of-storms, and even all-the-good-reasons-why-people-should-not-do-the-dangerous-pastime-the-author-does.

"Into a Desert Place" features many of the hallmarks of this unfortunate genre of "we nearly died" non-fiction. Baja California's alien landscapes, spiked with impassable mountains, rattlesnakes and boojum trees, certainly qualifies in many regions as a "need a sense of high adventure and a contempt for danger to tour there" area. Yet, "Into a Desert Place" does not repel in the way that "body count on Mount Everest" books can. On the contrary, this book simply charms. "Into a Desert Place" is a complete revelation--an accessible, winning account of how adverse conditions can be met by those most basic values--determination, a good attitude and, indeed, a good heart.

Mr. Mackintosh manages to convey the hardships of the trip, the kindness of most of the people he met along the way, and his own struggles to complete his quest, all without undue sentimentality or boastfulness. The book has a folksy, simple feel about it, but it is anything but a simple book. Instead of the usual travel book conceits based on machismo or "sheer pluck", we see Baja through the eyes of Everyman. We need more books like "Into a Desert Place" and fewer books about how many innocent tourists drowned at sea. We all belong in the desert place to which this book removes us. After reading this book, the reader may not wish to walk around Baja, but the reader might well wish to find that place of quiet, and think a bit.

A GREAT BAJA BOOK BY AN OLD BAJA HAND
I bought this book years ago, after reading a typewritten review in one of those "Doomsday Is Comming--Soon!" 'zines. Most of the books reviewed in it were those grim tomes about how to survive by eating nuts and berries after The Big One gets dropped and wipes out 50% of our population. Mr. McKintosh's book proved to be a pleasant suprise--a well- written account, an out-and-out adventure, a walk across the remote desert of Lower California on a shoestring budget.

When he got the idea to actually Do It, McKinstosh was slightly pudgy Scottish college professor whose main exercise seemed to have been lifting a bottle of beer to his lips while he watched football (that's soccer to us Yanks) on the telly. By the time he completed his several month journey, he was lean and sun-baked, the antithesis of his former couch potato self.

In the process, I'd say Mr. McKintosh grew, and actually "found the handle". He figured out what he was about, and what he wanted to do with his life.

For me, some of the most enjoyable parts were those describing how he begged equipment from manufacturers and outfitters, and how he raised funding along the way by writing accounts that he posted to newspapers and magazines.

Of course, there's The Adventure itself, including an amusing account of how he got sloshed from booze he obtained from gathering whiskey bottles that had washed ashore after being thrown overboard from cruise ships. (He sagely notes that staggering around in the boonies at night is risky business.)

Along the way, McKintosh gets befriended by all sorts of interesting, impoverished, and invariably generous folk. Those accounts have a Beginner's Mind freshness to them as well.

Since his original trek, McKinstosh has acquired a modicum of fame. He lectures and writes for the Baja Travel Club, and has since written another book about a second journey with a burro for company. That's a nice piece as well, but I prefer the freshness that only comes from seeing things for the first time.

I'm an old Baja hand myself, and over the years, I've collected a lot of books about Lower California. This one ranks at the very top.

So buy it, read it, and enjoy the photographs. I'm sure you'll find the money well spent.

Come apart, into a desert place
A British "every man" who describes himself as being a self absorbed couch potato, walks alone around the rugged and remote coastlines of Baja California. The self-deprecating honesty and insight is unusual and refreshing. He persists through heat and drought, rock slides and dangerous tides, scorpions and thorny plants, daunting geological impediments, rattlesnakes, and sharks -- yet the story is more 'man in nature' than the more common and inane 'man against nature.'
Mackintosh's sensitivity to the lands he interacts with is fascinating, particularly given that he is afoot in a 'wild' land a hemisphere from his home, in an environment foreign to his previous life. "I didn't need anyone to tell me what was right and wrong. The land was sacred to me. I was a part of it. I wasn't one of a million careless tourists with their trucks, bikes and polluting toys. I was one in a million. The desert was special and my needs were special. There was no conflict. ... The sense of being special to a special place was very much part of the exhilaration and the experience. ... Yet, to put it into words was to distort it. The feeling was the reality and the mystery. It saddened me to think that I might never be able to share it with another person. 'In what concerns you much,' wrote Thoreau, 'know that you are alone in the world.'" Relevant recountings of historical events are woven into the narrative, as are the author's spiritual musings.
The whole-heartedness with which Mackintosh merges into a new landscape is complimented by the friendships which he easily forges with the ranchers and fishermen of rural and wild Baja, and their families. As a journal of wilderness travel, this may be one of the best books written in the twentieth century.