Inside the country with rules so bizarre it makes North Korea look 'normal'

Dictatorships are weird places and very often come with all sorts of rules to satisfy the ego of the person at the top of the tree.

There'll very often be gaudy ceremonies designed to lavish unearned praise onto the dear leader and salve their insecurities that they're not actually all they're cracked up to be.

When many people think of a dictatorship with weird rules, they'll think of North Korea, which tries to stop its own people from leaving and only wants them watching certain things.

Grand monuments and projects which often do naff all while the people who build them live in abject poverty and repression are common, and while there's much to find ridiculous, these are still nations where the populace live in fear and misery.

Another country which suffers under a dictatorship is Turkmenistan, which is ruled by former dentist Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow and his son Serdar.

The cars in the capital city are all white, it's the rules (STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)

Some of the weird rules they've imposed on their people include how all the cars in the capital city of Ashgabat have to be white, so when a group of visitors ended up going there as part of a documentary from Nova Productions, they found the airport car park was filled with just white painted vehicles.

The white colour décor continues in Ashgabat, which is known as the 'white marble city', since it is full of buildings constructed out of the stone. In 2013, it earned a Guinness World Record for the city with the most white marble buildings at 543.

However, there may not be many people around to appreciate the architecture as the visiting reporters (who kept their actual job a secret) saw that in a city with an official population of around 900,000, they couldn't see any pedestrians and only a few cars going by.

Those who are in the city have to make themselves scarce by 11.00pm, as the group were told by their handler, 'it would be much better for your safety if you come back before 11 o'clock'.

If the streets looked empty during the day, they were completely bare at night, and an 11.00pm curfew has been in place since the COVID pandemic, which appears not to have been lifted.

Turkmenistan has a hugely criticised human rights record (NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images)

For those few tourists who do go to Turkmenistan and want to take some photos, there are even rules about where you can take pictures of the landmarks.

Not that you'd be able to share it while there, because another rule is that all social media apps are banned for most people.

They met a man who claimed otherwise, showing them his Instagram account, but they later discovered he was approved to use it to make attacks on people who speak out against the dictatorship.

Elsewhere on their trip to Turkmenistan, the journalists visited a supermarket where all of the food was out of date, with some of the products on the shelves marked as going off in 2022.

It can simultaneously be a bizarre place obsessed with collection Guinness World Records for various buildings and a frighteningly repressive country where the ruling regime has so much power they can install weird rules like cars in the capital city having to be white.