These Extreme Travelers Plan to Visit Every Country in the World

The convoy of SUVs sat idling in the early-morning dark outside the Ivy Garden. Veley agreed to let me ride with him. He took shotgun in a Mitsubishi midway down the line. Pena (the Brazilian pharmacist) and I hopped in the back. Soon we were roaring off through the city behind a flashing military-police escort vehicle that ran all the red lights.

Veley and I spoke about questions he loathes (what’s your favorite place?), where he’s been mugged (Buenos Aires), and how Ken Jennings, the host and 74-time winner of Jeopardy!, had dedicated much of a chapter in his book Maphead to Veley’s obsession with geography. Veley tells me how MTP has made him feel less lonely by fostering a community that gets him. That was especially true during the pandemic, when he and much of the group continued to move about the globe. “Travel is not about limitations,” he says. He doesn’t worry about his carbon footprint or how to offset it, either.

“You can’t argue with someone about that,” he says. “I can’t walk everywhere, and I’m not creating flights that don’t already exist.”

The convoy slows at a military checkpoint near a spot Google Maps identifies as Alkhanli, where men from the military’s demining unit are working in a field while wearing blast suits. They wave us through. “Welcome to Karabakh,” Veley says, using the shortened Azerbaijani name for the area. Our driver, Zaur, is nearly brought to tears. “First time here in 30 years,” he says.

Outside, rolling hills give way to the taller Lesser Caucasus Mountains. We pass vineyards left fallow for decades, rotting trellises jutting from the tawny soil. Signs along the highway announce that we’re on Victory Road. This was the route that Azerbaijani forces followed in 2020 to retake the area from Armenia during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. About a year after our visit in 2022, Azerbaijan would retake the entire region. Meanwhile, skirmishes were still erupting around the Lachin Corridor, a single road linking Armenia with the Karabakh guarded by Russian peacekeepers. We had hoped to cross it. Whether that would be possible could change from minute to minute.

The reason we’re allowed to enter the enclave at all is the work of a guy riding in one of the lead vehicles, Mehraj Mahmudov, the world’s most traveled Azerbaijani. At 56, Mahmudov is soft-spoken, with a round face and dark beard. Veley had connected with him at an Extreme Traveler International Conference held inside the Flame Towers in 2021, when Veley delivered a 90-minute talk about a three-week road trip in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The two hit it off. Mahmudov suggested that they bring travelers into the Nagorno-Karabakh. His purpose: even in a group as well-traveled as the MTP crew, few if any would have been there before. It was also a good PR move for Azerbaijan, which was working to rebuild the area after 30 years of occupation.

Mahmudov is the founder of one of Azerbaijan’s largest advertising empires, Banner Media. He tapped his contacts in some of the country’s highest offices to get permission for the trip. Later, the president of Azerbaijan himself, Ilham Aliyev, would award Mahmudov with the country’s highest civilian medal, the Heydar Aliyev Order, for his work to boost Azerbaijan’s image.

“It’s important for people to see the Azerbaijani side of the story,” Mahmudov told me through an interpreter. The overall message: despite having won the war, Azerbaijanis were victims, too.

The push to generate positive coverage of a very messy conflict becomes clear when we stop at a spanking-new airport in Fuzili. It’s eerily empty, and we pause now and then to take in various multibillion-
dollar infrastructure projects—new highways, new bridges, new tunnels—that the government has been building with lightning speed. At each turn, we hear how Armenia razed the area. In the old Soviet mountain-resort town of Shusha, the once thriving cultural hub of the region, we walk to an airy overlook atop the Djidir Plateau to peer down 2,000-foot escarpments at the valley below. The surrounding rocks bear the scars of an intense gunfight. Azerbaijani special forces used big-wall climbing tactics to scale these cliffs in a surprise attack that reclaimed the town from Armenian forces in November 2020.

“Who would climb up this?” Zaur Hasanov, a city councilor, tells me, pointing to the cliffs. “No one expected that.”

Every time we get out of the cars, dozens of reporters from Azertaj, the state news agency, and from ARB-TV, ITV, and others, spill out of vehicles that have been following the convoy. They set up cameras and microphones and entice the MTPers to give interviews about what they think of the area. Veley knows the game and says all the right things.

“The biggest impression for me is how fast the Azerbaijanis are putting in real infrastructure after 30 years of nothing happening on this land,” he says. “The speed of the reconstruction is impressive.”

To the Armenians watching the coverage from afar, the spectacle is appalling, even “ghoulish,” the Armenian Weekly would later write. “These unsuspecting tourists have become another arm of the Azerbaijani propaganda machine.”

Later Hasanov shows us the Agha Mosque and the distressed facade of the Natavan palace, once the home of Khurshidbanu Natavan, a 19th-century Azerbaijani-speaking poet known for her lyrical odes. For lunch, we stop at what feels like the Shusha’s only restaurant, Qoc At, or “ram meat” in Azerbaijani. A sign on the door offers soldiers 20 percent off. The booths are packed with construction workers and army personnel, but actual residents seem few.

I practically lick my plate of fire-roasted meat to a spotless shine before Veley gets up. We’re off to watch a military demining demonstration. “Time to go,” Veley says. “Next stop, we blow stuff up.”