Ashgabat: the white marble city with nobody in it

You come down out of the mountains and the city appears below you, white and gleaming, and it does not look real. Ashgabat is built almost entirely from white marble, and at the time there were barely any photographs of it online, so we had no idea what we were driving into.

The scale is the first shock, the emptiness the second. Enormous boulevards, eight lanes wide, and we were essentially the only car on them. Gold-domed palaces, vast squares full of monuments, an enormous mosque we had entirely to ourselves. A whole capital, immaculate, and almost nobody in it.

It is also spotless in a way that takes a moment to explain. There were people scrubbing the walls of the underground pedestrian crossings. People with brooms in the streets. Everyone, it seemed, had a job, because almost everyone works for the state.

And you are watched. We started photographing a presidential palace and men appeared out of the bushes, shouting at us to stop and delete the pictures. It happened again on a street of banks. Nothing threatening, just constant, immediate, and slightly surreal.

The truth arrived over dinner in the one restaurant we could find. Much of the city, we were told, is a facade: beautiful buildings that nobody lives in because nobody can afford to, while the markets and poorer neighbourhoods were cleared away because they spoiled the view.

Nowhere I have been feels like Ashgabat. Go for the strangeness, and know exactly what you are looking at.

A whole city, and no one home.