Nukus

Nukus is a closed Soviet chemical-weapons town turned capital of Karakalpakstan, and it holds one of the strangest museums in the world. Igor Savitsky collected the Russian avant-garde that Moscow had banned and brought it out here where nobody was looking, and the Savitsky museum now shows several thousand of those paintings, the second largest such collection anywhere. Around it the town is flat, dusty and hard, and the language on the street is Karakalpak. This is also where every trip to the dried bed of the Aral Sea is arranged, because no road to it starts anywhere else.