Graham Mackintosh

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 for 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. In 2020, he published six photographic Kindle books. Paddy's Huggy Adventures... and Paddy's Further Adventures... and Kayaking to La Paz, stages 1-4. He has so far published in 2021 - Paddy and Lavender's Christmas Adventures... and Guardian Angel Island. Graham Mackintosh now lives in San Diego, California and Baja 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.