Well, what a fantastic range of responses here!
Have read hardly anything I'd disagree with, and don't really know where to turn now.

Other than, yes, for Africa, I did FAR too much planning and preparation and took TOO much stuff.
I don't think I'd ever do a 'package organised' tour, but think myself a bit lucky that I had a career as an engineer, so feel no need of such a package. Others may not find themselves in that situation and need an 'escort' or 'backup'. But so what?

On that African trip I did a lot of 'people watching' (it was a slow trip compared to many I read about here). And I found, wherever you go on an 'adventure journey', you meet lots of ordinary local people who are also doing journeys, along the same roads and routes that you are travelling. And to them, it's all workaday routine, how they earn their livelihood. Many of them use simple small motorbikes, Chinese or Japanese, or bicycles, and carry more on them than you'd ever see a car carrying in the west.

So after about 9 months, with another 4 to go, I slowly came to the conclusion, this isn't an adventure at all. I was just mimicking, albeit for longer distances, what many local people do in the places I was travelling through.
But I had much greater freedom than them. I could stop as and when I pleased, go different places as I pleased, buy daily stuff in stalls and shops without worrying if I could afford it. Really, it was the ordinary African people I was meeting who were having the adventure in their lives, not me. I was just travelling, as slowly as I could, through their lands, experiencing through meeting them what an adventure it was to live their everyday lives in these places. Just an observer.

That's the conclusion I'm slowly coming to, although I'm still trying to work out what it really all means.
That is, to experience the adventure that people outside of 'the west' have in their lives, while I ride through, on 21st century machinery, with space-age tent, too many spares, being able to afford as much petrol, food and water as I could possibly want, and a piece of paper that flies me straight out if I fall to some tricky local disease.

Yes, I'll add to that, Cherry-Garrard's "The Worst Journey In The World", which I read in my 20s. (Still in paperback). It left me realising that for ordinary folk like me, the best we can probably do, is go "adventure chasing", in whatever way, and enjoy all it has to offer!

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TTR250 - London to Cape Town