Zarafshan is not a tourist destination. There are no monuments, no old town, no museum that an outside visitor will be allowed into. What the city offers is its strangeness — a Soviet-built grid of apartment blocks stranded in the Kyzyl Kum, an industrial gold-mining outpost the size of a small European town, with the largest open-pit gold mine on earth a few kilometres away. Get the permits sorted, fly in, and let the strangeness do the work.