Cholita wrestlers stage a performance on the street during the Electropreste celebration, which combines traditional and modern customs, in La Paz, Bolivia on March 12, 2022. (Photo by Claudia Morales/Reuters)

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)

Russian riot policemen beat young PREGNANT female anti-Putin activist during a protest rally against the Presidential inauguration of Vladimir Putin on May 6, 2012 in Moscow, Russia.

Flames from the Falls Fire burn on a hillside along South Main Divide Road in the Cleveland National Forest as firefighters drive through the area on Monday, August 5, 2013. (Photo by Kurt Miller/AP Photo/The Press-Enterprise)

The disused bobsled track from the Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympics is seen on Mount Trebevic, near Sarajevo, September 19, 2013. Abandoned and left to crumble into oblivion, most of the 1984 Winter Olympic venues in Bosnia's capital Sarajevo have been reduced to rubble by neglect as much as the 1990s conflict that tore apart the former Yugoslavia. (Photo by Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

A lifeguard warns swimmers as a sea gull flies by on Labor Day at Daytona Beach in Florida on September 4, 2023. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

A woman attempts to cover a tear gas canister fired by police at a crowd in Srinagar protesting against the recent killings in Kashmir, August 17, 2016. (Photo by Cathal McNaughton/Reuters)

People watch the erupting craters and the lava fountains from the old lava fields around the eruption site on the Reykjanes Peninsula, in Iceland, Wednesday, August 28, 2024. (Photo by Marco di Marco/AP Photo)