International Man: Doug, you recently visited Azerbaijan—a country most people have never heard of, let alone could find on a map.

You've spent decades exploring some of the world's least understood regions. What brought you to Azerbaijan, and how does it compare with other obscure countries you've visited for potential opportunity?

Doug Casey: I gave up sport traveling years ago. That's because the world has become quite homogenized. Tons of bucket-listing tourists everywhere, wearing the same clothing, maintained by the same ubiquitous food and hospitality franchises. There's not much point in pretending to be Richard Burton anymore.

That said, some friends—mostly Germans—who belong to ETIC, the Extreme Travelers International Congress, still enjoy travel camaraderie, and retro-rocking off the beaten path. I don't know what the future holds for my friends at ETIC, since there are fewer and fewer extreme places in the world. But on the other hand, I expect over the next five or 10 years we're going to have lots more war zones.

They decided to revisit Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, inviting Matt Smith and I along.

ETIC was founded by my friend Kolja Spöri, an ex-Formula One exec. There were ten of us, and everyone had been to over a hundred countries as a bare minimum. To give you a better flavor of the company, one of them had run a marathon on each of the seven continents on seven consecutive days, an unusual world record. No cubicle dwellers here.

The long war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, mostly over a disputed enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh, had been ongoing since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It finally ended about eighteen months ago. The Extreme Travelers are fairly familiar with desolation, and usually it's hard to beat a recent war zone in that department. But, as I'll explain, the place was a huge surprise.

We spent a few days in Baku, the capital. Incidentally, the first commercial production of oil in the world was here, not in Pennsylvania, as most Americans think. You've probably seen this famous picture of Baku 150 years ago, with several hundred primitive oil wells spraying oil everywhere. No longer. Azerbaijan is still a big producer of petroleum, providing 70% of the national income. But things are now neat, clean, and modern.