A blue-tailed bee-eater chases down its prey along the banks of the Kaveri River on the outskirts of the city of Mysore, India in the last decade of June 2025. (Photo by Nitin Jain/Solent News)

Travel photographer Amos Chapple recently crossed into Turkmenistan on a three-day transit visa and was able to photograph many of the sights and monuments in Ashgabat, the capital and largest city. Turkmenistan is a single-party country, a former Soviet state, run by a president at the center of a cult of personality.

Photo: A young couple leave the Alem Entertainment Center in Ashgabat. The current president has a history of breaking obscure records. In 2012 the wheel atop this complex was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest enclosed Ferris wheel. The structure was built at a cost of $90m. (Photo by Amos Chapple via The Atlantic)

This picture taken on May 21, 2016 shows professional wrestlers fighting each other during the Wrestling City Asia organized by Singapore Pro Wrestling at a stadium in Kuala Lumpur. Kenneth Thexeira is a mild-mannered writer for an interior-design magazine by day, but on certain nights his alter ego bursts forth in golden tights and a baby-blue cape: enter “The Eurasian Dragon”. (Photo by Mohd Rasfan/AFP Photo)

This image taken from video provided by TVBS shows a commercial airplane clipping an elevated roadway just before it careened into a river in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, February 4, 2015. The ATR-72 prop-jet aircraft had 58 people aboard. (Photo by AP Photo/TVBS)

A man hugs a child at the Santuario de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe during a celebration on the Virgin of Guadalupe Day in Guatemala City, December 12, 2015. According to Catholic believers, December 12 marks the anniversary of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe at the Cerro del Tepeyac in Mexico. (Photo by Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters)

Nyibol Lual, 13 years old, helps her family to prepare the land for cultivation on May 31, 2017, in Panthau, Northern Bahr al Ghazal, South Sudan. The family has a small land where they cultivate sorghum. An estimated 63 per cent of the population in Northern Bahr al Ghazal is experiencing severe food insecurity, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report. The situation is particularly bad in Aweil West and Aweil South counties, where the exhaustion of household food stocks and growing dependence on financially inaccessible markets have left the population facing Emergency levels of food insecurity. (Photo by Albert Gonzalez Farran/AFP Photo)

This picture taken on January 14, 2021 and released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on January 15 shows Pak Jong Chon, chief of the General Staff of the Korean People's Army, during a military parade celebrating the 8th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) in Pyongyang. (Photo by KCNA via KNS/AFP Photo)

A woman dressed in the style of a Hindu goddess keeps her face partially covered for a ritual during Maha Shivaratri celebrations on March 12, 2021 in Kaveripattinam, India. Maha Shivaratri is a major Hindu festival celebrated annually in honour of the god, Shiva. The festival is observed with chanting prayers, fasting, and meditating to overcome “darkness and ignorance” in life. (Photo by Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images)