Okatse Canyon is a limestone slot in the Imereti hills of western Georgia, near Kutaisi, and the way through it is 780 metres of steel grating bolted to the cliff, a hundred and forty metres above the river. Until 2014 there was no way along the gorge at all. The walkway is barely a metre wide, it sways a little in the wind, and the mesh keeps the drop in sight under your boots at every step. Halfway along, at Boga, the walls pinch to about three metres apart and nearly close overhead. If you lean on the rail there, the slot runs clean down to water a hundred metres below. At the far end a railed deck pushes twenty metres out into open air, and that is the turnaround, because the path goes no further.
Nothing about the approach prepares you for it. From the gate a stone path winds two kilometres through the shade of the Dadiani forest, the old summer estate of the princes who ruled this corner of Georgia for centuries. The big trees are standing because it was their land long before it was protected land, and the walk in and out is longer than the walkway itself. Below the cliff the Okatse has polished the pale limestone into tiers and clear green pools. Deeper in the gorge, well under the steel path, a side stream drops into a basin ringed with boulders, which a separate trail brings you to. Up the valley the Kinchkha waterfall comes down a towering cliff in one thin ribbon into a green pool that people wade into in summer. In autumn the woods below the railing turn gold and orange around the green water. Past the last railing the walls close over the Oskapo, sixty metres of water trapped between them, reached only by canyoners with ropes. Beyond that the gorge runs on for another dozen kilometres with no path in it at all.