Travelling in Stalin's coffins in Chiatura, where smiling doesn't cost anything

I reversed my route from Portugal to Macau to return to a place where, to travel from home to work (and vice versa), you have to cross a valley, a river and a city... hanging from a steel cable that is more than fifty years old. The journey is made on cable cars that have been built and - virtually - unmaintained since the 50s.

Due to the steep river valley, the workers in the Chiatura mines spent too much time travelling from the city to the mines, affecting productivity.

In an effort to reduce journey times, a criss-cross system of cable cars was installed in 1954 by Stalin's government in the former Soviet Union, of which Georgia was an integral part.

Productivity in the mines increased dramatically with the so-called "Stalin's metal coffins", which were also able to transport some ore directly to the factories. Chiatura is a town in the Imereti region of western Georgia that was founded in the late 1800s and quickly became an important source of manganese and iron.

Chiatura isn't exactly a place you visit because there's a terrace, a monastery, a church or any other polished tourist attraction to welcome domestic or foreign visitors. Perhaps the only exception now is the suspended cable cars.

However, the few visitors who come to this region do so for the - perhaps morbid - attraction of being able to travel from one side of the valley to the other without delay, without having to call a taxi or take a bus.

There were several cable cars along the valley, but one of them was considered the main one, at the southern end of the city. So I decided to go to the main station. This is where most of the workers used to access the mining complex.

They did this on board a kind of metal cabinet with two vertical and two circular windows. To operate it, all an employee had to do was press a yellow button at one end of the steel cable to start the cable car and then use a handle to control the ascent or descent.

As I approach the station, I see one of these cable cars suspended in the air or on a thick steel cable over the river. The small round windows and the vertical ones are dirty or worn from decades of use. There is little left of the original colour of this "cabinet", but there is a lot, perhaps too much rust.

The station's doors are open - wide open, in fact. These brown, wooden doors, made up of small square panes of glass from top to bottom, let you see inside, where black graffiti almost fills one of the walls. Two huge pulleys, attached to the wall and floor, hold up the thick steel cables and the giant cable car.

The building, sturdy but old and dilapidated, is empty. Four or five metres away, you can see a hotel. On the façade, where there used to be a window, there is now a concrete block covering the space.

On the hotel's small terrace, a woman - I assume the owner - takes notes on a tiny pad of paper. I don't see any guests coming or going.

As I watch another cable car resting near the ground, which used to travel to the opposite side of the valley and seems to ascend vertically, I am approached by the only other tourist passing by on this hot Georgian summer afternoon.

A 50-something German man is travelling with his daughter and asks me - although before he asks the question he has little doubt what my answer will be. "Are the cable cars working?"

I reply, without hesitation, but discouraged: "Not any more. Operations have been suspended or cancelled." The German says goodbye, after offering me a lift to Tbilisi, and I continue my serene observation of the cable cars and the station.

In Zestafoni, I had met a Swiss couple from Basel who had been in Chiatura the day before and were frustrated that they hadn't had the chance to risk their lives on these dead cable cars.

Even before I visited Chiatura, I had read that foreign visitors were no longer allowed to use the "coffins" because of the system's insecurity. Local citizens, however, could continue to use them.

However, in recent weeks all activity by these means of transport had been suspended. I believe that the suspension or cancellation was for safety reasons - before the nickname "coffin" became a literal fatality.

I confess that even if they were still working, I don't know if I'd have the courage to enter these "wardrobes" or "coffins" to travel to the other side of the valley. So perhaps I was disappointed and relieved at the same time.

For decades, summer, winter, any time of year, men and women have thrown themselves down and up the valley. Without fear, without thinking about the (lack of) maintenance of these metal compositions. Every day, making the journey from the huge Soviet blocks to the hard labour of mining.

I walk into the street and am approached by a local who explains to me - with gestures - that the coffins in Chiatura are sealed. Maybe for now, maybe forever. Later, I discover that work is almost complete on a new cable car station in another part of the city.

I cross the bridge and another friendly man points to the top of the valley and asks me - in Russian - if I want a lift up there, to visit the place where one of the cable car lines begins or ends. And also to admire what I realised would be a spectacular view of the city, the river and the green mountains.

He invites me to get on a minibus and, without hesitation, I accept this unexpected invitation. A few minutes later I'm travelling through the city streets in this vehicle, passing all the places I'd walked past - like the street market, where women sell fresh vegetables: tomatoes, watermelons, parsley, coriander, and cucumbers, lots of cucumbers.

Large cucumbers, larger cucumbers, smaller cucumbers. With green or yellow skins. Sitting on a wooden bench, a woman takes a bite out of a cucumber without peeling it.

My driver and I drive along Chiatura's main street and pick up people: men, women and several children. Everyone is surprised to see a foreigner in their local means of transport. The driver explains that I'm travelling from Portugal. Then they talk to each other and one of the children is urged - by his mum - to talk to me to practise his school English.

Other people get into this minibus and drive off smiling and laughing. One man, sitting in the front seat with his back to the windscreen, cracks jokes and everyone laughs in unison. I laugh too, but of course I don't understand a word he's saying.

I can understand a few words in Russian and the same in Turkish, but in Georgia it's impossible for me to identify a single word when the locals talk to each other. Or even when I see something written on the advertising hoardings or on the papers on display in the tabliers of the buses to the destinations.

Half an hour later, these men, women and children begin to climb into small houses at the top of the hills, on their way to the mining area. What is now done in half an hour used to take about five minutes on a short cable car journey.

Houses with roofs and some zinc walls, with various patches. These are basic houses, where several families live - as is common in Georgia.

I arrive at the entrance to the mining complex and the starting and finishing point of one of the cable cars - now inactive.

Two security guards guard the entrance to the mine in a relaxed manner, while chatting to some workers leaving their shifts. Lorries carry ore down and up. My driver tells me that we have another 30 minutes until we go back down the hill to collect more people and return to the city.

In 1989, at the height of mining and shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Chiatura's population was around 29,000. Today, the number of inhabitants is around 12 thousand.

Chiatura may even have considerably less population and soon become - as has happened to many towns that depended on mining - ghost towns. This small Georgian town has no tourist attractions such as cathedrals, monasteries, museums and isn't even on the tourist route.

Chiatura surprised me because there I found what is absent in other places where money from tourism circulates, where there are floods of tourists visiting restaurants or wandering the streets, or taxi drivers hawking their wares.

This is a city that is sometimes given morbid nicknames. A place stuck in the past, with little aspiration for the future and where living conditions are light years away from the luxury and pleasures of a modern society.

Here, however, I found people who were friendly, welcoming, good humoured, open and ready to help. In Chiatura people smile and laugh. And that doesn't take much. You just have to want to.

From Portugal to Macau - chronicle 1TP5Q16

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