These Extreme Travelers Plan to Visit Every Country in the World

Photos of different locations over a passport background

(Photos: Adobe Stock; Tim Neville (Near Aghda, Azerbaijan))

Meet the Extreme Travelers Trying to Visit Every Country in the World

Published: Nov 25, 2024 Updated: Dec 23, 2024

I tagged along on a surreal trip to a conflict zone in Azerbaijan with a group of explorers known as the world’s Most Traveled People. No matter that the war there wasn’t over yet.

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It’s a pleasantly warm afternoon in Azerbaijan, a former soviet republic sandwiched between Russia and Iran, and the tank crewmen of the Qubadli regional Border Detachment are hosting a party. For hours they’ve been working to raise a wedding-style tent and set a dozen tables with cartons of fruit nectar, bowls of nuts, and plates of pale pink meats. The Azerbaijanis have been fighting off and on for more than 30 years with Armenia, another ex-Soviet state a grenade toss to the west, but tonight the war can wait.

Around 5 P.M., 14 shiny Nissan Pathfinders, Toyota Land Cruisers, and Mitsubishi Pajeros come racing into the encampment behind a military-police escort vehicle—a boxy Russian-built Lada—with lights flashing and engine whining. The SUVs file into a gravel parking area that was scratched out of the scrubland. Dozens of the detachment’s T-72 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles sit silently nearby like insects ready to sting.

The dust settles and about 30 civilians from more than 20 countries step from the cars, stretch their legs, and look around in wonder. Some are doctors. Some are vagabonds. All of them are here to see one of the world’s most contentious enclaves.

The detachment base sits on the fringes of Nagorno-Karabakh, a 2,700-square-mile patch of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains nestled inside Azerbaijan but historically home to a lot of ethnic Armenians, too. The two have been at each other’s throats for generations over this region, with thousands of lives lost. In the past four years, Azerbaijan has reclaimed the besieged area, and more than 100,000 Armenians fled back to Armenia. While the conflict appears to be over for now, there are remnants of the war everywhere: step off the road and a land mine might do you in.

Map of Azerbaijan — (Illustration: Erin McKnight)

A muscular, jovial colonel with thin, graying hair and slate-colored eyes comes forward in his battle dress. The tank crews stand at attention in navy blue boiler suits. His name is Murad, but that’s all he can say. A patch on his chest reads O (I) RH+, which is his blood type.

“Welcome! Welcome!” the colonel says to the guests. “We’re so honored you are here.”

The leader of the visiting guests, Charles Veley, a 58-year-old from Marin County, California, steps forward from a white Mitsubishi that I’ve been riding in, too. “Thank you for having us,” Veley replies. “I hear you have a surprise.”

“Yes, yes,” the colonel says. “I hope you enjoy.”

What’s no surprise is that Veley, who has a boyish grin and a neutral, even way of speaking, is here. That’s because he is, according to a system he created, America’s most traveled person, a wanderer who has visited more of the planet than almost any known human in history. Fewer than ten people have seen more of the globe than he has.

To quantify that, there are lists. The most straightforward one comes from the United Nations, which affirms that there are 195 countries in existence, including places like Palestine and the Holy See. Federal Express says that it delivers to more than 220 countries and territories. The list that Veley compiled, and that thousands of other extreme travelers recognize, tops out at more than 1,500 distinct places that are currently possible for one to visit. It includes countries, regions, enclaves, atolls, both poles, and at least one small, sheer-cliffed islet in the middle of the ocean. Russia isn’t just “Russia,” but 86 discrete stops. The United Kingdom has 30 stops, including islands like Herm and Sark. To see the United States, you must travel to 79 places that stretch from the Florida Keys to the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.

“Charles isn’t an adventure seeker but a knowledge seeker,” his friend Kolja Spöri, the German founder of the Extreme Traveler International Congress, a yearly gathering of the world’s most obsessive travelers that’s been held in such places as Baghdad, Equatorial Guinea, and Siberia, told me. “He’s the spiritual father of all country collectors,” he added in a blog post.

Charles Veley, the founder of Most Traveled People (Photo: Tim Neville)

Mehraj Mahmudov, the world’s most traveled Azerbaijani and organizer of the trip (Photo: Tim Neville)

More than 30,000 people have joined an online group Veley founded in 2005 called Most Traveled People, which has emerged as the most determined arbiter of what counts as a place, a legitimate visit, and who has been to the most of them. MTP, which also helps people plan trips to locales no travel agent would touch, ranks its members by awarding one point for each destination, as well as merit badges for visiting certain beaches and World Heritage sites. Some locations are simple and obvious, like Paris’s Île-de-France. Others are obscure and dangerous, like Bir Tawil—a lawless, 795-square-mile trapezoid of desert between Egypt and Sudan that belongs to no country at all, a real terra nullius.

“People ask, why would you want to go to Somalia?” Veley says of a country known for high rates of murder and kidnappings. “Well, it’s part of the world, and I want to see that.”

To date, no one has visited all 1,500 places on the MTP list, and Veley is not even number one at his own game. He is close, though, at 1,268 destinations, and the Delaware-size Nagorno-Karabakh is one of the more difficult spots to reach. To enter, you need to know some powerful people.

Veley has handpicked an international group of hardcore travelers from MTP’s ranks to join him on a whirlwind two-night, 930-mile road trip through the Nagorno-Karabakh, complete with military escort. For the Azerbaijanis, it’s a chance to let travelers see with their own eyes another side of a story that’s little known in the West. For the group, it’s a chance to learn and experience a place where few tourists are allowed.

Meanwhile, it’s party time. The colonel leads us to the wedding tent, where a table groans under the oily weight of every imaginable automatic weapon. There are Israeli Uzis and Tavor X95’s, Russian Kalashnikovs, and gas-operated M4 carbines from the U.S. There’s even what looks like an M60 machine gun plucked straight out of the Breaking Bad finale. We are allowed to shoot any of them.

“What about an RPG?” an American named Adam Bornstein asks later. I think he’s joking, until a soldier brings out a grenade launcher instead.

Before I can make sense of any of this, the air vibrates with the throaty diesel roar of the tanks rumbling to life.

“C’mon!” Veley calls to the group, gesturing to the vehicles. “Pick one and jump in!” He disappears into a T-72 and trundles off into the dust.

The Lesser Caucasus Mountains in Azerbaijan (Photo: MB Productions/Getty)

I’d never heard the phrases “extreme travel” or “country collectors” before I met Veley. The idea of them didn’t sit well when I did. Few things make me feel as fulfilled as travel, and I’ve built a decades-long writing career around it. Before that I spent years traveling and studying in Germany, Peru, and Bolivia. Twice I’ve lived in Switzerland, where I learned the local dialect and where my daughter was born. Each trip I’ve taken—even the ones to difficult places like Afghanistan and North Korea—reinforced a level of humility and shared experience that makes me feel like the most privileged person on earth. Float on your back in the warm waters of Palawan while millions of bats take to the sky, or drink tea on the floor with the Yazidi in Iraq, and the cup that holds all that is possible in your life suddenly can hold a little more. I am deeply grateful.

So the idea of reducing something so meaningful and transformative—and increasingly exclusive—to a collector’s game felt supremely icky, a big eff-you to the world and its cultures and all the resources it takes to go from A to B. How uninterested do you have to be in a place to create rules that govern whether you’ve actually been there?

“If you’re just ticking boxes, you’re seeing a lot, but are you feeling a lot?” says Jake Haupert, cofounder of the Seattle-based Transformational Travel Council, an organization that promotes “meaningful” journeys. “Travel is just a medium for human connection.”

Country collectors bristle at this holier-than-thou stance, which other travelers, as well as influencers, editors, and maybe a writer or two, have heaped upon them.

“I hate how judgmental people are about country collectors,” says Dave Seminara, a country collector himself and the author of Mad Travelers, a book that dives into the world of extreme traveling. “The reality is these people are spending their time and money in places that need more tourism, like Uzbekistan’s Fergana Valley, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burundi, and other places that are way, way off the grid. I think the world might be a better place if more of us took the time to see more countries that are so completely unlike the ones we live in.”

It would take time for me to overcome my own prejudices, and it started with understanding the ecosystem out of which Veley sprang and by which he was indelibly shaped. MTP is just the latest iteration of this kind of extreme travel group, each of which has had a different method for quantifying travel. One of the oldest, the Travelers’ Century Club, or TCC, was founded in 1954 in Los Angeles by a tour company that pioneered around-the-world luxury tours by plane. The TCC maintains a very popular list of 330 destinations that many extreme travelers tackle while also trying to visit every country. Its guidelines are ludicrous, though. Catch a connecting flight in Istanbul and the TCC says you’ve been to Turkey.

More than 30,000 people have joined an online group Charles Veley founded in 2005 called most traveled people, which has emerged as the most determined arbiter of what counts as a place, a legitimate visit, and who has been to the most of them.

MTP’s guidelines aren’t that easy. Its rules say that you must actually enter a country legally, but how long you stay doesn’t matter. You could literally fly 21 hours to Tuvalu in the South Pacific, clear immigration, catch a flight home minutes later, and earn your point. Even Veley can see the folly in that.

“People think that’s just stupid,” he says. “What did you accomplish? You learned where it is on the map? You learned how to get a ticket there?”

Veley admits to committing a few travel sins himself in the days before MTP. He once stepped into Belarus along an unmanned portion of the border with Lithuania just so he could claim he’d been there. Even so, he firmly believes that it’s better to put one illegal but harmless foot into a country than not to try going there at all. “You can’t quantify experience,” he says. “The more you go, the more you know.”

With so many places checked off his list, Veley’s views on travel have changed, and he’s made it a point to return to places like Belarus for more in-depth encounters. As a kid, he didn’t travel much beyond bouncing between New England, where his father lived and was an author, and West Virginia, where his mother ran a farm. For college, Veley signed up for the Air Force ROTC with a full ride to Harvard and got a computer science degree. As it happened, a retinal flaw led to an honorable discharge from the Air Force and a waiver of his post-collegiate duty.

By then his passion for travel had really taken off. He went to Australia and saw Europe on a Eurail Pass. He moved to Germany to learn German and Spain to improve his Spanish. He loved the feeling of crossing borders into new cultures with different currencies and words. (Veley now speaks Italian, too.) “Every time you go somewhere new, you have this sense of unfamiliarity, and that gives you hypersensitivity,” he says. “It felt a bit like being Alice in Wonderland.”

Old meets new in the city of Baku. (Photo: syolacan/Getty)

It’s a misconception that extreme travelers must be wealthy—one person on the Azerbaijan trip tells me that he couch-surfs a lot while on the road, and occasionally sleeps in safe city parks—but Veley’s financial successes have opened a lot of doors for him. In 1991, in his mid-twenties, he helped start a business-analytics firm called Micro-Strategy that had him jetting around the world to establish new offices. The company went public in 1998. His wealth soared to as much as $166 million, at least on paper, before the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, a few months after he quit in 1999. Still wealthy enough, he could travel a lot more.

In the early 2000s, having already visited 76 countries for work and play, he found the TCC list in an airline magazine during a flight to South Korea. Some obsessive part of his already-competitive brain hummed to life. “I’ve always been someone who has to finish what he starts,” he says. “If I collect something, I want it all.”

Things really took off when he discovered round-the-world tickets. By changing where he began and ended his journeys to cities outside the U.S., Veley found incredibly cheap deals, once scoring 25 flights for $5,000, all in first class. The logistical challenge of designing the itinerary that would cover the most places with the greatest efficiency enthralled him. “I thought, wow, now I can optimize the world,” Veley says. He’s circumnavigated the globe at least 15 times.

Around 2005, Veley began to make headlines when he petitioned Guinness to crown him the planet’s “best traveled person.” At the time, that record belonged to an attorney from the American Midwest, John Clouse, who’d held it since the late 1980s. Veley, then in his late thirties, had visited all but one of the 265 countries, autonomous regions, territories, and other places Guinness used to define the feat.

The effort had been intense. Once, in 2003, he left his now ex-wife, Kimberly, at home with their newborn baby (he says that she supported his decision to go) during the Christmas holidays, to embark on a three-month boat trip to Bouvet Island, an uninhabited Norwegian dependency in the subantarctic and one of the most remote islands in the world. Instead of awarding the title, though, Guinness decided that its “best traveled person” category was too subjective and eliminated it for good.

“It was really frustrating,” Veley says. “It was like I’d won a marathon only to find that all the officials had gone home.”

MTP sprouted out of that setback as a way to pick up where Guinness left off. For the past 20 years, Veley has worked to make the MTP list the most comprehensive in existence—an amalgam of lists from the United Nations, International Olympic Committee, ham-radio operators, TCC, and, most recently, NomadMania, a group started by a 52-year-old Greek traveler named Harry Mitsidis, who until recently held the top spot in the MTP rankings at 1,362 destinations. The MTP list has become so granular that it now includes geographical oddities like Canada’s Victoria Island (an island with a lake that has an island with a lake that also has an island) and Rockall—an uninhabited, Trader Joe’s–size outcropping in the North Atlantic, 270 miles northwest of Ireland. Veley visited that one in 2008 by leaping from a boat, body-surfing the surge, and briefly clinging to its sheer, slimy walls.

All this is to say that no matter how you feel people should travel, Veley is undoubtedly one of the most experienced hardcore globetrotters out there. So if he calls you up with an invitation to go on an adventure with him and 30 of his most badass buddies to a place you know almost nothing about, icky or not, it’s going to be wild.

Tank crews prepare to take MTP guests for a ride. (Photo: Tim Neville)

Danish aid worker and MTP member Merete Engell (Photo: Tim Neville)

A few days before the tank party, I arrived in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku. It’s an ancient city of 2.4 million people built on the Absheron Peninsula, a wind-scoured knuckle inhabited since the third century B.C. Veley and much of the group would be arriving over the next 36 hours, so I dropped my bag off at the Ivy Garden Hotel and took a walk. The air felt plump. Baku sits at 92 feet below sea level, making it the largest city in the world with a negative elevation. A light breeze purled off the Caspian Sea.

Never been to Baku? It doesn’t take long to like. Azerbaijan was once the earth’s gas station. The nation provided as much as 50 percent of the planet’s oil, processed in one of the world’s first refineries, and all of it passed through Baku. That made it an attractive port for the Soviet Union, which annexed Azerbaijan in 1920 and ruled it until the country declared independence in 1991. Today Azerbaijan is still flush with fossil-fuel money, but it’s evolved into a multicultural, predominantly Shia Muslim country of about ten million people who are liberal enough to have their own national beer.

Baku’s main tourism play has come from hosting huge international sporting spectacles like the European Games and Formula One races. Even on a normal day, the tension between East and West, old and new, burbles up everywhere and makes the city a delight to wander around. Magnificent carpet shops line the 12th-century battlements that mark the city’s ancient inner core. The skyline glimmers with postmodern trophy architecture, like a 300,000-square-foot shopping mall made to look like a lotus flower, and a 36-story waterfront hotel with a gaping arch cut through the middle. The Flame Towers, a nod to Azerbaijan’s oil and gas industry, can hardly be believed: three skyscrapers that rise as high as 600 feet, like wispy flames frozen in glass and steel. The buildings appear to flicker in orange and red, thanks to a gazillion exterior LED lights.

I explored in awe. Kids on electric scooters zipped through parks while couples hung out under the olive trees. Strangers said hi. The streets were clean. As night fell, I picked my way through a maze of tight alleys to Old School, a dimly lit bar with Soviet antiques and a clientele nostalgic for Marxist intellectualism. Having known nothing about the city before, I decided I would return to Baku in a flash.

That, I learned, isn’t a sentiment shared by all.

“Why would I ever go back to a place twice when there are so many others to see?” one of Veley’s invitees, Miriam Stevens, a witty Disney merchandise manager, asked me the next day as we bounced along in a van outside the city. Stevens, who estimates that she spends as much as $20,000 a year on travel, says she likes to stay in a place “long enough to do it justice.” To date that has taken her to 107 of the TCC’s list of 330 places. For this trip, she arrived early and organized a day tour around Baku to see Zoroastrian fire temples, 40,000-year-old petroglyphs, and hundreds of strange, car-size mud volcanoes that pop and ooze like planetary pustules. I joined her. All around us, the blank countryside felt stark and maybe even ill. In places, crude oil wept naturally out of the soil.

Azerbaijan is still rebuilding from a decades-long war with Armenia. (Photo: Tim Neville)

Later that afternoon, I found Veley wearing slacks and a button-down shirt at the Ivy Garden Hotel. He’d just arrived. He was sitting in the lounge with his friend Kari-Matti Valtari, the world’s most traveled Finn, currently in 17th place overall. The two had met in 2014 in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Chechen Republic, at an Extreme Traveler International Congress. Together they have traveled to places like Clipperton Island, about 1,600 miles west of Costa Rica, and Jolo, an island in the southern Philippines, where two tourists were beheaded after being kidnapped in 2015. Few travelers had been back since.

Veley looked bleary from the long journey and the 11-hour time difference with California, but he had resolved not to sleep just yet. “I can do that later,” he said. “Lots of catching up to do.”

Others trickled in, and we headed out as a group to Qizil Baliq, a restorani where a long table had been set with flatbreads, olives, and briny cheeses. A cover band played at one end of the room.

“If you’re just ticking boxes, you’re seeing a lot, but are you feeling a lot?” says Jake Haupert, cofounder of a Seattle-based organization that promotes “meaningful” journeys. “Travel is just a medium for human connection.”

I promised myself I’d keep an open mind about the MTP group, and that said more about me than them. It turned out these weren’t obsessive box-checkers who’d reduced the planet to rankings and badges, but mesmerizing, deeply curious people who carried on conversations with zero one-upmanship or braggadocio. Jørn Bjørn Augestad, a Norwegian in his thirties, talked about his hospital stay in Iran following a horrific car crash that nearly destroyed his leg. (He fully recovered.) Merete Engell, a Danish aid worker, had spent months in post-9/11 Afghanistan helping women at a small clinic. There was the disillusioned editor of National Geographic Russia, whose offices had been shuttered after the Ukraine invasion, and a person from Thailand who could tell you all about how not to get stabbed in Douala, Cameroon. Fernanda Pena, a Brazilian pharmacist, would soon be on her way to Yemen and Syria.

No one had a death wish. These were the traveling versions of climber Alex Honnold: calculated, driven people who’d dedicated themselves to honing skills and managing risks to such an astounding degree that they’d attained a level of freedom difficult for an outsider to understand. It’s addicting, especially when your stage isn’t a big wall but a very big planet.

“Once you’re hooked on travel you can never really feel sated,” Seminara writes in his book Mad Travelers. “It’s not really a small world after all.”

The band wrapped up a jaunty rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Veley took the mic.

“OK, we have a very early start tomorrow,” he said. “I know you’re all the world’s most traveled people, but just remember that these next few days will be an exercise in not knowing what’s going on.”

City counselor Zaur Hasanov (Photo: Tim Neville)

Rambi Francisco, an expert travel hacker who has amassed tens of millions of frequent-flyer miles and hotel points (Photo: Tim Neville)

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.

��ϳԹ��, 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.”

There’s a lot of blowing up to do in Nagorno-Karabakh, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Skirmishes have broken out and the military can’t guarantee our safety. We pile back into the SUVs and backtrack on a 100-mile-long detour. “We will miss some mountain scenery, but we’ll be safe,” Veley says. We pass trenches and tunnels where the armies clashed, a cemetery, and the scorched, crumbling remains of a mosque.

That night we leave Karabakh to find a hotel, since there are very few operating in the enclave. It’s a simple but comfortable white-walled inn in Horadiz, a city on the Iranian border. The hotel is entirely ours, but there aren’t enough rooms, so we double up. I’m paired with a 72-year-old psychiatrist from Illinois named Ashok Van, who came to the U.S. from his native India in 1977 with $6.50 in his pocket. He’d been to eight countries at that point. Now he’s been to 193 and is just three visits shy of completing the 330 places on the Travelers Century Club list—the one many extreme travelers start with before graduating to other, more exotic lineups. He still wants to visit Wake Island, a Pacific atoll administered by the U.S. Air Force, but the military won’t let just anyone in. I crash on the bed and play Worldle on my phone, a Wordle-like game where you get six tries to guess a country by its shape. I show the screen to Van, who solves it instantly.

“Easy,” he says. “Uganda.”

All these folks would ace geography class. Some are true masters at finding inexpensive ways to visit many places on the map. The next morning at breakfast, while Veley calls his girlfriend—Riza Rasco, the world’s most traveled Filipina—I find Rambi Francisco buried deep in his phone. A self-described “experience maximalist,” Francisco, who is muscular, with a soft, kind face, is serving in the U.S. Air Force while working on his PhD in business—not because he wants to be a CEO, but to scratch an itch to max out his education. “If there are three degrees, I want all three,” he says.

Francisco is a subspecies of extreme traveler, a “travel hacker,” and arguably one of the best. The idea is to find loopholes in credit card offers and frequent-flier programs to amass an absurd number of points that translate into free travel. He’s earned and burned at least 30 million frequent-flier miles this way and now teaches others how to do it, too.

These were the traveling versions of climber Alex Honnold: calculated, driven people who’d dedicated themselves to honing skills and managing risks to such an astounding degree that they’d attained a level of freedom difficult for an outsider to understand.

I nearly spit out my tea when he tells me about one of his greatest hacks, which involved a promotion with Delta: order $500 of stuff from the Sky Mall catalog; get 25,000 bonus miles. The offer was limited to one award per frequent-flier account, but there was no limit on how many accounts you could have. So he opened 50, bought 50 Samsung tablets, and immediately sold them to a buyer he’d lined up in New York to recoup the $25,000 he’d spent. To avoid the cost of reshipping, he had the tablets sent directly to the buyer. “I never saw a single one,” he says. He then called Delta to merge the accounts. After ten minutes of back-and-forth with a befuddled but hamstrung supervisor, he ended up with 1.25 million miles, enough to fly his extended family in first class round-trip to Europe twice. In another scheme, with hotel points, he and a group of his best students booked 17 over-the-water villas for six nights at the new Hilton Maldives Amingiri Resort and Spa, a $150,000-plus endeavor.

“No one paid a dime,” he says.

By 7:45 A.M., we’re rolling back into the enclave, this time along a rough road with a rail line and two superhighways being built on either side. Iran stretches off to our left. We blast through checkpoints where soldiers salute. “They probably think we’re high-ranking officials,” Veley says.

Azerbaijani TV crews film segments following the MTPers around the region. (Photo: Tim Neville)

We spend the day checking out what I mistake for ancient ruins but are actually cities that Armenian soldiers had ransacked decades ago—displacing tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis—and then left for the trees and shrubs to reclaim. We wander around a shiny new settlement, Aghali, where the government is building hundreds of houses and giving them away for free to Azerbaijanis who lost their homes under Armenian control. All of the massive infrastructure projects form part of a grand plan called Boyuk Qayidish, the Great Return, which seeks to resettle any of the 1.2 million displaced Azerbaijanis who wish to come back.

No one mentions the horrors the region’s ethnic Armenians faced—the expulsions, the death threats, and the cruel and degrading treatment of its POWs, outlined in a 2001 report by Human Rights Watch. “We have been victimized and criticized for things we have never done,” Azerbaijan’s presidential foreign policy adviser, Hikmet Hajiyev, tells me later back in Baku. “We would like to turn the page on the war and confrontation and live as normal neighbors, side by side.”

As many as one million remaining land mines make that dream challenging to realize, and the Azerbaijani National Agency for Mine Action has been working to find and clear them all. It is incredibly tense work. We stop to watch a demining demonstration where soldiers let Engell, the Danish aid worker, detonate a string of anti-tank mines discovered just off the road we’re traveling on. Even from 300 yards away, the blast broils my face, shoves me backward, and nearly knocks my phone from my hand.

That night we party at the tank base, where we spend our second and final night. After taking their turns on the automatic weapons, the MTPers wander back to the wedding tent, the flesh on some of their forearms pocked with blisters from the hot spent casings. I stroll off to a nearby stream.

When I look back, Veley is seated with the colonel drinking wine and laughing. Over the coming months, he’ll make four more trips to the region, each one doing nothing to boost his ranking. He’s coming to terms with the fact that he’ll never complete his own list. “Motivations haven’t changed,” he tells me later in a text. “Money has dried up.” Even if he did complete it, there’d still be plenty left for him to do.

“Why does anyone take on any kind of project?” Veley says. “When you complete it, you get a hit of dopamine and you’re proud of yourself. There’s always something that’s just a little bit new for you that’s going to give you that jolt of achievement. It’s the feeling of being at the pinnacle of your craft.”

Country collecting might not be the best way to travel, just like bagging every fourteener might not be the best way to climb. Right now there’s a guy named Winter on a quest to visit every Starbucks on earth, a number that changes almost daily. Sometime in the next few months he’ll hit 20,000 stores, maybe with a trip to Costa Rica or to Britain. “Hard to plan,” he says. Yet, even with sponsorship and other deals that come from such stunts, isn’t it all kind of pointless?

Maybe, but stop moving for long enough and someone will bury you.

A hundred yards from the tent, the chatter and the laughter fade under the hiss of the brook. I find a fishing rod the soldiers have strung up and cast a heavy lure into the swift-moving water. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll catch a fish I’ve never seen.

From November/December 2024

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Lead Photos: Adobe Stock; Tim Neville (Near Aghda, Azerbaijan)

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