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)

A man carries his dog as he prays during Vesak Day, an annual celebration of Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death, at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon temple in Ayutthaya, Thailand, May 10, 2017. (Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)

Andrew Parkinson, animal behaviour category winner: Crepuscular Contentment, Derbyshire. “In 15 years of working with badgers I’ve never seen a badger sit out in the open to have a scratch. I was sat concealed behind a tree and downwind so it was especially nice that the badger had his back to me, demonstrating just how inconspicuous and inconsequential my presence was”. (Photo by Andrew Parkinson/British Wildlife Photography Awards 2017)

Cemetery workers lift a corpse from a coffin to a metal plate as they prepare the body for cremation at a cemetery in Maracaibo, Venezuela, November 27, 2019. Some overcome the financial burden of a relative's death by renting caskets, a cheaper option than buying one. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

Sulphur miners haul sulphur up an arduous path out of Indonesia’s Ijen volcano. The average carry out of the volcano is 70 kilograms per load per miner. The all-time record carry was 120 kilograms in one load. Extraordinary numbers given most of the miners only weigh around 55 kilograms. Ijen volcano, Indonesia, 2012. (Photo by Hugh Brown/South West News Service)

An owl peeps out from behind a rusty piece of farming equipment in Teddesley Park, Staffordshire, UK in the last decade of July 2025. (Photo by David Akers/Solent News & Photo Agency)

Britain's Red Arrows airplane display team perform during D-Day commemorations in Portsmouth in southern England on June 5, 2014. Several hundred surviving veterans of the 1944 D-Day landings are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the mission on both sides of the English channel. (Photo by Carl Court/AFP Photo)

A camel yawns as a tourist checks images on her camera following a ride on a camel safari alongside the Pacific Ocean on Lighthouse Beach, north of Sydney, December 4, 2014. For 25 years camel rides on this beach have given visitors to Australia's holiday coast a rare experience available only in a handful of locations in the country. Australia's long history with the “ships of the desert” goes back to the 1800s when they were imported from Afghanistan and India for use as transportation across Australia's vast deserts before being released into the wild following their replacement by motorised transport. (Photo by Jason Reed/Reuters)