Socotra

This unique, captivating, and photographically rich travelogue reveals to the reader the secrets of an isolated archipelago in the northwestern Indian Ocean, a place where Europeans seldom tread. While most visitors to Socotra admire its endemic nature on the surface, traveller Michal Hejna, along with his colleagues Markéta Jakovenko and Martin Novák, repeatedly ventured in the opposite direction – down, beneath the island's surface. During three caving expeditions, the Czech explorers spent almost two months on Socotra, and they take the reader to places not usually visited: into its hidden, little-explored underworld.

Socotra is an isolated archipelago in the northwestern part of the Indian Ocean, lying about 350 km south of the Arabian Peninsula. It is part of Yemen. The main island of Socotra is approximately 130 km long and up to 35 km wide. It is home to roughly 50,000–60,000 inhabitants, mostly in coastal towns, with about half living in the capital city of Hadibo. Thanks to its long-term isolation, many endemic species of plants and animals have evolved here, earning Socotra the nickname “The Galápagos of the Indian Ocean”. In 2008, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Natural Heritage List.

PROLOGUE: It is autumn 2020. I’m digging in the garden, the radio playing in the background. Some fellow named Petr Vahalík is talking about the island of Socotra, about the projects that Mendel University in Brno has there, about Boswellia research, cataloguing Dragon's Blood Trees, mapping the island, and researching goat parasites. When he starts talking about caves, I pay attention. He says there are many of them, they are large – in short, a caver's paradise. Hmm, Socotra, you say?
I couldn't find much information about the caves on the internet. Between 2004 and 2014, Belgian cavers organised nine expeditions there, finding 68 caves, several of them over a kilometre long. The Giniba Cave, thirteen kilometres long, is the longest cave in the Middle East. After the Belgians, no one else had been there.
I remember my caver friend Markéta, who had also mentioned the Socotran caves once. We call Professor Petr Maděra, the head of the Socotra projects. We quickly introduce ourselves and our plan to build on the work of the Belgian cavers. To our surprise, Petr agrees. The trip in spring 2021 is thwarted by COVID, but in the autumn, we join his team.