Hidden Earth 2026

Call of the Unknown - South Garo Hills Expedition 2025

60 minute Film|Thomas Arbenz

Abstract

Throughout the month of March 2025, CORE GEO EXPEDITIONS' second caving expedition to South Garo Hills took place in Meghalaya, North East India. The bare statistics show a successful outcome with 93 caves surveyed within 4 weeks, yielding a total of 13.2km of new cave passage.

But beyond the facts, there is more: the Film is looking deeper into the nature of the caves and what they do to the cavers who are exploring them. It is offering possible answers to what is motivating explorers to venture deep into the underground world, hunting for those unique moments in a caver's life that turn speleology into passion.
Words written down by Leonardo da Vinci, more than 500 years ago, were the inspiration for this quite different approach to tell the story of our explorations:

"And as I was drawn there by an irrepressible desire, always eager to see the immense abundance of all kinds of strange shapes created by resourceful nature, after wandering for a while among the gloomy cliffs, I came to the entrance of a large cave, in front of which I stood for a while in amazement because I knew nothing about it. With my back bent, my left hand resting on my knee and my right hand shading my lowered, wrinkled forehead, I bent forward again and again, sometimes there and sometimes there, to see if there was anything to distinguish inside; but I was prevented from doing so by the deep darkness that prevailed there. And after I had stood in front of it for a while, two feelings suddenly stirred in me, namely fear and desire: Fear of the gloomy, threatening cave and desire to find out whether there was something marvellous in there.”

It is right there where the Film starts: accompanying the members of the expedition team on their journey - trying to fathom the true nature of exploration and finding out what rewards are there to be taken back to light.