I am (just about) ready for the off. My plane departs from London in a few hours.

Ahead of me is 6 weeks of beautiful desert, searing heat, crushing (or liberating) isolation and mile after mile of cathartic, energy-sapping, gut-busting cart pulling!

It's very unlikely that I'll have access to emails or a telephone during that time. I will be, for all intents and purposes, off the map (as Jack Bauer used to say in 24 - "I'm going dark.")

Unfortunately there will be no blogs during this time, although we may be able to post the occassional twitter message using a SPOT Connect satellite receiver.

This website will go quiet until Christmas, when I'll begin to share the story upon our return.

See you on the other side...Oman, here I come!

Meanwhile - check out this video below by the photographer George Steinmetz - this should give you a good idea of where Al and I will be...

It’s now just a few days until Alastair Humphreys and I set off to explore the Rub' al Khali, or Empty Quarter desert, on foot. Al has written a great blog post explaining some of our motives and what we hope to achieve on this expedition. We will follow the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger – literally in that we hope to roughly retrace the route of his 1947 crossing of the Sands, and metaphorically in that we are seeking some of the same escape, fulfillment, joy and ascetic misery he was searching for in the largest sand desert on earth.

We won’t be blogging during the trek. Instead we’ll be filming the whole journey extensively, with our main aim being to make a great documentary at the end of it all. We’ll be tweeting using our SPOT tracking device to give some basic updates on our progress.

Our start point is Salalah, the second city of Oman. Having never been there I can’t comment on it too much, but it certainly seems a beautiful and relaxed place. With help and guidance from those much more experienced than us, Al and I have settled on a design for our desert cart. We’re using quite a simple but robust structure, and doubling up the wheels on each corner for increased surface area on the sand (to stop us sinking.) Onto the cart we will load jerry cans of water, bags of food and the rest of our personal equipment. Everything will have to be exceedingly minimalist, as it seems dragging a heavy cart through sand in 40 degree heat will be rather tiring.

We hope that the total weight will not be much more than 250kg, and we’ll tandem pull. Every two weeks or so we will resupply with water, but the food we carry from Salalah must last us until Dubai, our end point, 43 days later.

The challenges of this journey are probably rather clear. Heavy cart, deep sand, relentless heat. Potential for sandstorms. Infrequent, if not complete absence of, human contact. Spending 6 weeks walking just inches away from each other, with no escape. Long, hard days of trekking with monotonous scenery. A diet of dates and couscous. No (or heavily rationed) whisky supplies.