I am a doctor. I have two children, a job I care about, responsibilities I can't simply put on hold, and all the commitments that gather around an adult life without anyone quite noticing when they arrived.

I am not planning to sell the house, resign from work or announce that I have finally discovered freedom. I have no particular desire to escape my ordinary life.

I rather like it.

The trouble is that a life doesn't have to be bad to become full.

It happens quietly. Work takes up more room, sometimes because we have to let it and sometimes because we genuinely care about what we do. Children need time. Relationships need time. Friends and parents need time. Then there are the hundreds of small obligations that don't amount to much individually but somehow manage to fill the spaces between everything else.

Technology was supposed to help with some of this, and of course it has. I can do things today from a phone that would have required an office, a map, a travel agent and several telephone calls not very long ago.

There is a price for that convenience, though.

The same phone that lets me leave work also lets work come home with me. A message arrives over dinner. An email is read just before bed. Something that would once have waited until morning no longer has any practical reason to wait.

We can work almost anywhere now. We are not always quite as good at deciding when we shouldn't.

I don't think the answer is to turn work into the villain.

Work can be interesting. It can give us purpose, competence, friendship and a considerable part of our identity. Mine is medicine, and it would be odd to spend much of my adult life caring deeply about it only to decide that it belongs on the wrong side of some imaginary boundary between work and "real life".

Perhaps the problem isn't that work has entered our lives. Perhaps it is that we haven't been quite as deliberate about what else gets a place there.

Curiosity, for one.

We live in an extraordinary age for answers. Most practical questions can be settled in seconds. We carry maps of almost the entire planet in our pockets. We can translate languages we don't speak, identify a mountain we've never seen, watch somebody dismantle an engine we don't understand, and find an explanation for almost anything before the question has had much time to bother us.

I wouldn't give any of that up.

Still, having access to more answers doesn't necessarily make us more curious.

Information and curiosity are not quite the same thing. Information usually settles something. Curiosity has an inconvenient habit of opening another door. It starts with why?, how?, what's over there? and, every so often, the rather less sensible I wonder if I could do that.

A functioning adult needs answers. Plenty of them.

But I suspect a good life needs a few questions left open.

It needs room for things that don't have to justify themselves by being useful. A passion you are still bad at. A conversation that leads nowhere. Time with your children without turning it into an educational activity. Learning something without needing a qualification at the end of it. Going somewhere for no better reason than wondering what is there.

Play, essentially.

Adults are very good at disguising play as something respectable. We call it training, personal development, a project or a challenge. Perhaps that makes it easier to put in the diary.

Nami is, among other things, my attempt to put a little more of it into mine.

But there is a larger question behind that.

Wanting to do something is easy.

Finding room for it once your life is already full is rather more difficult.

And I don't mean finding a free Sunday afternoon.

I mean choosing something that requires time, money, learning, organisation and probably a few sacrifices; something large enough that it will inevitably compete with other parts of a life you have no intention of losing.

The easiest answer is to wait.

Wait until there is more time. More money. Fewer responsibilities. Until the children are older. Work is quieter. Retirement arrives. Until you are properly prepared and own the right equipment.

The other answer is to change everything.

Leave the job. Shed the commitments. Build an entirely different life around the thing you want to do.

For some people that is possible. For some it may even be exactly the right choice.

But that isn't the question that interests me.

I want to know whether it is possible to make room for something substantial without first having to empty your life to fit it in.

I don't know.

Nami is, in part, an attempt to find out.

It could have taken an entirely different form.

A boat, a mountain, an aeroplane, or anything else that might have made me think: I don't know how to do that. I wonder if I could learn.

In my case, it happened to be a pickup truck and the idea of travelling overland.

That is simply the form the experiment has taken.

And this is where the Hilux comes in.

Nami is a Toyota Hilux.

I bought her with an idea that, at the time, was considerably less philosophical than this page may be making it sound: I wanted to learn to travel overland.

I knew very little about off-road driving, navigation, recovery or mechanics. I wanted to understand what the vehicle could do, discover what I couldn't do, and see whether, given enough time to learn, the two of us might eventually be capable of making our way across a continent.

The destination came later. Although not by accident.

In January 1907, the French newspaper Le Matin published a challenge asking whether anyone would attempt to travel by automobile from Peking to Paris.

Five vehicles eventually appeared at the start. Among them was an Italian Itala carrying Prince Scipione Borghese, the mechanic and driver Ettore Guizzardi, and the journalist Luigi Barzini.

It was still early enough in the history of the motor car for the journey itself to be a question. Could this new machine cross enormous distances, much of them without anything resembling the roads for which it had been designed?

They went to find out.

I have always liked that.

I have no intention of recreating the Peking–Paris of 1907. It belongs to its time, and the world through which Borghese and Barzini travelled has disappeared.

But there is something compelling about borrowing a line drawn on a map more than a century ago and asking a different question of it.

So I turned it around.

Paris to Beijing.

The year, too, has a history behind it.

In May 1927, a 26-year-old German racing driver named Clärenore Stinnes left Frankfurt in an Adler Standard 6.

Travelling with the Swedish cameraman Carl-Axel Söderström, she headed east through Europe and Asia, across Siberia and the Gobi, before continuing by ship and road through Japan, the Americas and back to Europe.

She reached Berlin on 24 June 1929, after more than two years and some 46,000 kilometres, completing what is recognised as the first circumnavigation of the world by car.

A hundred years later seemed a good moment to put another car on an eastbound road.

So: Paris to Beijing, 2029.

Those are the coordinates.

They are not a promise.

I don't know whether we will get there.

And I don't particularly want to pretend otherwise.

Because reaching Beijing isn't the only possible result of the experiment.

More importantly, the journey doesn't begin on the day we leave.

It begins now.

It begins with trying to find the time to learn. Deciding what is worth spending money on and what isn't. Working out which skills are genuinely necessary. Buying the wrong things. Changing my mind. Discovering limits. Learning from people who know infinitely more than I do and trying to understand which parts of their experience can sensibly be brought into the life of an amateur.

The Preparation Diary is the record of that part of the experiment.

This isn't an expert's account of preparing an expedition. There are plenty of people far better qualified to write that.

It is the record of somebody who doesn't know yet and is trying to find out.

The years before 2029 aren't simply preparation for the story. They are a large part of the story.

But looking only at what happens to me would make for a rather poor experiment.

That is why there are the Field Notes.

They look outward.

At people who have done extraordinary things, and at the lives they were living while they tried to do them.

Explorers, mountaineers, scientists, athletes, and less famous people who have tried to reconcile what they wanted to do with what reality allowed them to do.

They look at what happens to the human body when we ask unusual things of it.

At where sensible amateur preparation ends and something requiring professional expertise begins.

At what we can learn from people who live a discipline every day without pretending that we can simply imitate them.

Medicine, physiology, psychology, history, mechanics and technology belong there whenever they help us understand the things we are trying to do.

Sometimes that will mean understanding Nami herself.

But the vehicle is one of the subjects of the experiment.
It isn't the reason the experiment exists.

There is an entire industry ready to tell a new overlander what his vehicle requires, accompanied by an impressively large catalogue of things available to meet those requirements.

Some of them are essential.

Some are genuinely useful.

Some, I increasingly suspect, are mostly useful for carrying all the other things we bought because we thought they were essential.

That is where a very simple rule began.

Less is more.

At first it meant only this:

Change something when experience gives me a reason to change it.

Learn first.

Buy afterwards.

And when skill can solve a problem better than another piece of equipment, try to acquire the skill.

But perhaps the same rule has something to say outside the garage.

The perfect version of almost anything tends to require resources that an ordinary life doesn't have.

Unlimited time. Unlimited money. Professional-level preparation. The best equipment. The freedom to leave whenever you want and return whenever you please.

If we wait for all of that, for many of us the right moment may simply never arrive.

Perhaps, then, the problem isn't how to reproduce the perfect version of a different life.

Perhaps it is how to identify the substance of what we want to do, preserve that, and simplify everything else enough to make it fit into the life we already have.

That doesn't mean doing difficult things carelessly.

There are mountains an amateur shouldn't climb, conditions in which an amateur shouldn't drive, and risks that no amount of enthusiasm makes reasonable.

Understanding our limits is as much a part of this experiment as trying to extend them.

The best can be the enemy of the good.

And sometimes doing less is precisely what makes doing something possible.

For now, Less is more is only a rule for building a pickup truck.
At least for now.

There is still a great deal I don't know.

Which is rather the point.

And somewhere beyond all of that — the courses, mistakes, small journeys, books, people, mechanical decisions and probably several things I haven't thought of yet — there is a road heading east.