ASHGABAT, TURKMENISTAN

Turkmenistan is one of the the most unusual countries in the world, and Ashgabat is its bizarro capital, the heart of the strangeness that pervades the country.  Ruled for years by a dictator who changed the names of the months to match those of his family members, and whose rambling thoughts on history and culture were compiled into a book of nearly religious importance, Turkmenistan bears the marks of his and his successor's cult of personality.

The first visual taste of this insanity comes from a mile outside of the capital, when you first see the white towers of Ashgabat gleaming over the horizon.  Passing a bus station that looks more like a space station, my travel partners and I barreled towards the pale buildings on the nicest roads in all of Central Asia.  Ashgabat, like all of the development in Turkmenistan, is paid for by petrodollars, pulled out of the ground like magic, transforming this desert country into its ruler's utopian fever-dream. Leveled by an earthquake in 1948, Ashgabat became a blank canvas for the first ruler of an independent Turkmenistan, the self-styled Turkmenbashi (literally, "father of all Turkmen") to create his vision of a modern capital.  The most obvious feature of Ashgabat is its white buildings.  And it is not that some of the buildings are white, or that most of the buildings are white, but that, by government decree, all of the buildings are to be made of shiny white marble.  It's uncanny for an outsider, and the first day all you can do is look up and wonder in disbelief. I asked one taxi driver what he thought of all this.  In a rare moment of opening up he confessed, "I wish sometimes that there were other colors. Every building is white.  White, white, white.  It makes your eyes tired."  Too true.  And this is on top of all of the massive statues, towers and structures commemorating so many great governmental achievements that the locals can't remember them all.

At my behest, the next morning the three of us set out on a pilgrimage of sorts, a walk through the sweltering heat to find the great statue of Turkmenbashi.  The structure, officially known as The Arch of Neutrality, used to sit in the middle of the city, its 250 foot spaceship-like base supporting a 50 foot tall gold statue of Turkmenbashi, that used to always turn to face the sun.  After his death, the new President Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow ("don't even try to pronounce it, you won't remember," we were told) moved the entire monument far out of the city center, to its lonely location in a purpose-built park. Turkmenbashi now sits forever still, facing the city he built from afar, a reminder that forced adoration rarely lasts.