Women offer prayers on Valentines Day at the Trimurti Shrine, which is believed to bring love, in Bangkok on February 14, 2023. (Photo by Manan Vatsyayana/AFP Photo)

A Chinese tourist uses the scarf of a friend as she is helped while she and others struggle to climb in the wind on an icy section of the Great Wall at Badaling, on a cold day after a snowfall on November 30, 2019 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

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)

An Iraqi special forces soldier wears a rose in his body armor as troops move from the Yarmouk neighborhood to take another district from Islamic State militant control in Mosul, Iraq, Wednesday, April 12, 2017. (Photo by Maya Alleruzzo/AP Photo)

Milena Jami whips her llama to win the first place in the a race for children of ages seven and eight at the Llanganates National Park, Ecuador, Saturday, February 8, 2020. Wooly llamas, an animal emblematic of the Andean mountains in South America, become the star for a day each year when Ecuadoreans dress up their prized animals for children to ride them in 500-meter races. (Photo by Dolores Ochoa/AP Photo)

Santi Diaz Mosquera, 41, a “percebeiro” (barnacle fisherman), collects barnacles on rocks on the coast of Ferrol, in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, December 15, 2016. (Photo by Nacho Doce/Reuters)

Sukhoi Su-30SM jet fighters of the Russkiye Vityazi (Russian Knights) aerobatic team perform during a demonstration flight in Krasnoyarsk, Russia October 6, 2018. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Chocolate is the greatest gift the Earth has given us. The dessert table would be a sad sight without it. It’s so beloved, so appreciated, that the Swedish scientist who named the cocoa plant that gives us chocolate called it Theobroma cacao, which means “food of the gods”. Here: Farmer holding a freshly cut cocoa bean pod, revealing the pulp and seed inside on a rainforest farm. (Photo by Doug McKinlay/Getty Images)