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In conversation with Terry Shepard, award-winning broadcaster, narrator, and author, a deep dive into the writer's craft with the artists and support systems who create the stories we love.
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There is a moment every traveler knows standing before something iconic, camera in hand, convinced you understand what you're seeing.
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And yet, just beneath the surface of the world's most photographed places are stories far stranger, darker, and more extraordinary than any guidebook ever lets on.
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Ronan O'Connell has spent more than two decades circling the globe, visiting over 60 countries in pursuit of stories that linger long after the journey ends.
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A contributor to the National Geographic and a byline you've seen in outlets from CNN to the BBC, he brings a journalist's rigor and a storyteller's curiosity to every destination.
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In his new book, Hidden in Plain Sight, The Untold Mysteries, Myths, and Marvels of the World's Most Popular Landmarks, he peels back the familiar to uncover revolutions, legends, and secrets hiding in plain view.
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It's a reminder that travel isn't just about where we go, but how deeply we're willing to see.
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Ronan O'Connell joins us from Australia today.
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It's great to be with you, my friend.
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Thanks so much.
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Thank you very much, Terry.
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That was quite an introduction.
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I appreciate it.
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What motivated you writing the book?
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It came out of the blue, to be honest.
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I was approached by Harper Collins a couple of years ago, and I, up until that point, I'd never thought about writing a book.
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I hadn't pitched a book to anyone.
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I was very busy doing my freelance journalism.
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And they Harper Collins approached me and said that they had been keeping track of my work for National Geographic and that they liked the style of travel writing that I tended to do, which was a little bit offbeat, focusing on unusual kind of stories or untold elements of history.
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And so they just said, look, could you come up with some ideas for coffee table style travel books that are along that line, that are a bit unusual, something we haven't necessarily seen before?
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And so I went away and I came up with a range of ideas.
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And luckily enough, they decided that they like two of those ideas.
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And so they signed me to a two-book deal, the first of which is now being released, hidden in plain sight.
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And so the idea for the book, they basically said, look, it the brief for coming up with ideas of what they were interested in.
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They said, we want something that's unusual, that's a bit offbeat, because there's a lot of coffee table travel books out there.
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We need something that doesn't just mimic them, but it also needs to be marketable as well.
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It can't be too niche.
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And so that was where I came up for the idea of, okay, what if we look at the world's most famous landmarks to make it very marketable?
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And so you can have on the cover, if need be, the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, so that people will recognize what you're writing about.
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But then let's do what I had often done throughout my travel journalism, which was to try and unearth an angle to a location that either hadn't been written about before or hadn't been written about very widely, particularly in a travel context.
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So yeah, that was then how I came up with this idea for hidden in plain sight.
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I basically picked a range of the world's most famous landmarks and then just spent time digging into their history, digging into their design, the archaeology, perhaps anthropology that's linked to them, to try and find anything that I felt was unknown about those locations.
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And then in a lot of cases as well, just to make sure that it wasn't just that it was unknown to me, I also sounded out people from those cities to try and run it by them and find out whether or not this was something that even locals were not aware of.
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And in most of the cases, it was something that a lot of locals even were not familiar with.
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The reason being that a lot of these locations, these landmarks, are centuries, sometimes even millennia old.
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So within that incredibly long time frame, there's always going to be an extraordinary number of events that are very notable and which you they can't all be catalogued in the public sphere.
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They can't all be well known.
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There's always rich fodder there to be able to dig into, and that was what I did with the book.
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Travel journalism sounds like a dream gig.
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How did you become a professional in that role?
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I actually just fell into it.
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Similar with the book, where it just fell out of the blue.
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I wasn't planning to do it.
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I'd never thought about being a travel journalist or planned to do it.
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I went to university to do print journalism and had always wanted to be a news journalist, focusing on politics and crime and those kinds of things.
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So I worked for nine years after university at daily newspapers here in Perth.
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And I spent seven years at what was then the second biggest newspaper in Australia, which was called The West Australian.
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And I did as I had planned to do from my university days.
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I focused on reporting on crime and politics.
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And then when I was about to turn 30, I decided that I, while I still had the chance, I wanted to go out and explore the world.
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And one thing I'd always wanted to do was to go and move and live in Ireland because both my parents are from Ireland and I have all these cousins and aunties and my my half-brother who lives there as well.
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And I also, before doing that, I wanted to go traveling in Asia for a few months.
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So I quit my job at the West Australian.
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I was traveling through Asia for a few months en route to moving to Europe.
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And near the end of that time in Asia, I met a delightful young woman who's now my wife while I was traveling through Thailand.
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And after a few months, I moved back to sorry, while I was in Thailand, I spent a couple of weeks with her.
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And then basically we said goodbye and we said, look, you know, both of each other, good luck in your life.
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And I went and moved to Europe.
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But we then started chatting every day on Skype.
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And after a few months, I decided that I was going to take another risk, like I'd done by quitting my job in Perth.
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And I was going to ask her if she'd come traveling through Asia with me for a few months.
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And she said yes.
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And so we went on a huge adventure for about two months through Asia.
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And by the end of that, we were just we were very closely connected.
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And so I decided then that I was going to move to Thailand so that I could continue the relationship with her.
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And at that point, I had to find a way to make money.
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I'd been burning through all my savings that I'd done in Perth.
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So I now had to get a job, and freelance journalism was the obvious route.
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And I started doing writing a little bit about cricket, which was one of my favorite sports, and travel.
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And it was the travel that I enjoyed much more than writing about cricket.
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So next thing I knew, that was just my profession, and it's all gone from there.
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Our special guest is Ronan O'Connell.
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He's a journalist and an author.
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His new book is Hidden in Plain Sight: The Untold Mysteries, Myths, and Marvels of the World's Most Popular Landmarks.
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You describe hidden in plain sight as a way of seeing the world.
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What do most of us miss when we visit these iconic landmarks?
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I think what happens with a lot of these places is that people get a very basic overview of it, of the history of it, or of the design of it, or of any unique stories related to it.
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Because for the most part these days, people get their information about tourist sites online.
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People don't really use the guidebooks as much anymore, unfortunately.
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The guidebooks like Lonely Planets and Fromers and these kind of guidebooks, there's so much care and detail put into those things that the information that you're reading, A, is 100% accurate, but B is also quite layered and gives you better context about the importance of that particular landmark within the city, within the country.
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Whereas these days, people don't want to be carrying around guidebooks, understandably, they get it from their phone and they tend to just pick whatever is the first link that comes up on their phone.
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So they type in Eiffel Tower history, and it could just be a blog that's paid for very strong search engine optimization to make sure that they're the top that comes up on Google.
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But a lot of these websites, there's no fact-checking.
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A lot of them they literally just copy and paste from other blogs.
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And so what happens is that the same descriptions of the Eiffel Tower are basically replicated on about a hundred different blogs.
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All of them are very skin deep and often, as I said, inaccurate rundowns of the history and designs of these landmarks.
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And so people just get a little bit of information and then they think, okay, I've got a sense of it now.
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And then they'd go and explore the location.
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And that's fine.
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You don't necessarily have to really delve into a location.
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You don't need to really understand a landmark to be able to have a great time and appreciate it.
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And for a lot of people, when they're traveling, they actually, especially if they've got a particularly stressful life back at home, they just want to switch off.
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So I can understand 100% people just going to a location and just appreciating it for what they see, for what they hear, they smell.
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But yeah, specific to what you're asking, I do feel that now that there is a bit of a paucity of quality information out there about many landmarks and many locations.
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And so even people that are quite interested and would like to know quality information about that location often will end up getting something that's that may not be accurate or maybe quite derivative and just repeats what they've heard a million times before about the Eiffel Tower.
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That was part of what I wanted to do with the book was to try and give people information that I felt would be completely new to them and would give them a totally fresh perspective on that landmark, which even if they visited it many times, that they would read this and think, wow, I had no idea about any of this.
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With so many amazing places to see in the world, how did you decide which ones to include in the book?
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I had a very long list to start with.
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I probably had about 50 landmarks that I was picking, and then I also had to I had to whittle it down a bit based on locations that I felt I could also get to safely because I wrote and photographed the book, like I did all the photo shoots myself.
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So traveling around the world like that totally by myself, I don't have a handler with me, I don't have an interpreter.
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The locations that I picked were also shaped a bit by how safe it would be for me in that location, also how easy it would be for me to get visas.
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Is it a country that is safe for journalists or is it a country that causes problems for journalists?
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So unfortunately, there was a number of locations that I would have loved to include in the book, but it was just a little bit too risky to go there, particularly on a very short time frame of trying to travel to, you know, I traveled to 35 or 36 countries to do photo shoots for this book.
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So that had a big influence on it.
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So I whittled it down from 50 to about 35, 36.
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I traveled to all of those landmarks, which were all of which were in different countries.
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So it was 35, 36 countries.
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And from there it got whittled down further to about 23 for the book.
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In a number of instances, we had to remove some due to photo permit issues.
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And in other times, it was that perhaps HarperCollins felt that some of the chapters were a touch too similar, and so we removed some.
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But it was quite daunting looking at all these landmarks around the world and trying to work out, okay, which ones should I include.
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But yeah, in the end, uh I was also very keen to get as many different corners of the world included as possible.
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So I felt that in the end we got a really nice mix of countries and cultures that are included in the book.
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Ronan O'Connell is our special guest.
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We're talking about hidden in plain sight, the untold mysteries, myths, and marvels of the world's most popular landmarks.
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What was your process for separating fact from myth, especially when dealing with folklore and supernatural stories?
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Yeah, some of the stories that are in the book are just straight related to legend and mythology.
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And so obviously, with the way you write it, you make it clear to the reader that this is something that is not confirmed, it's not factual, it's something that is really almost like a fireplace kind of story, but in such a more sophisticated way that it's been crafted specifically to reveal things about a religion or a culture or a country.
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And I had written a lot about mythology and legends in my work previously.
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It was something that I'd specialized in was finding a way to weave mythology into travel stories.
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And I liked writing stories that explain to people as well how if they were interested in a particular type of mythology or tale, legend about a country of how they could actually go on a trip that would trace those locations through that country.
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So yeah, then obviously, as well, as you're going along, there's a lot of fact-checking you've got to do because at times you'd come across some story and you'd think, wow, this is an incredible story.
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And a couple of hours later, once you really get deep into the research, you'd start to question it and go, Oh, I'm not sure how reliable perhaps this story is.
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So there was a lot of times when I researched, took me down what turned out to be dead ends.
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So yeah, there was a there was just an enormous amount of research in the book and just constantly needing to confirm whether things are true or not, and then often finding that I'd need to switch tack and maybe ditch a particular topic or a chapter, because as it turned out, it wasn't quite what it appeared at first.
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It is said that once we become travelers, we are forever changed in our outlook towards the world and towards ourselves.
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How has travel changed you?
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It certainly made me appreciate Australia and Perth, the city that I'm from, a lot more.
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I was born and raised here.
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I lived my whole life here until I was 30.
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And it was very easy to get complacent.
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And when you're used to a certain lifestyle, a certain freedom, certain levels of safety, you take them for granted, whether you intend to or not.
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So for me, traveling around the world and seeing the fact that people in so many countries did not have the kind of freedom or the access to beautiful parks and to free schools and to a good healthcare system, it yeah, it made me so much more appreciative.
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And it also made me a little bit guilty, to be honest, for not appreciating it as much as I should have earlier in life.
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But it also just it the big thing that it's done for me is it's made me much more interested in history, in anthropology, and that has flowed through to me having a much greater interest in Aboriginal Australian culture, in our indigenous culture, which when I was growing up in my schools, I wasn't taught a lot about, unfortunately, because of growing up in the 1990s.
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Unfortunately, Australia wasn't progressive enough yet to be teaching us enough about Aboriginal education, which fortunately now has changed.
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I've got a six-year-old boy who's in school and they get taught so much about indigenous culture here in Australia.
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So that's a wonderful change.
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But it's been interesting that going to other parts of the world and finding all of these incredible strands of anthropology in these countries and learning about cultures in different ways has then made me realize that I grew up with perhaps the oldest continuous civilization in the entire world, a 60,000-year-old culture that was right under my nose that I unfortunately had never paid enough attention to, but now I do, and I'm just endlessly fascinated by Indigenous Australian culture, and it forms one of my favorite chapters in the book.
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One of the fascinating things about the book is your visual storytelling.
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You have over 150 beautiful photographs.
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How do you balance the visual storytelling with historical narrative in a book like this?
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I think for me, I just basically kept the two things separate.
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I didn't ever think about trying to write it to match the photos or take photos to match the writing.
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I just went to these locations.
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When I was traveling and going to these locations, it was all about the photography.
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I just had my photographer's hat on and I was just trying to shoot the most beautiful photos that I possibly could.
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And similar to with my writing, I was always looking to try and photograph these locations from a different angle.
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And that's also why before I went to all of these landmarks, I never looked at photography of them.
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I didn't go on Instagram to look at how other people were photographing them because I did not want to find myself influenced or just copying what other people had done, as beautiful as their photography may be.
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I really wanted to go there with fresh eyes and try and capture different angles.
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So yeah, I basically I'd go to these landmarks and just walk around and just do circles and circles, even when I felt I'd exhausted every option, just to see if perhaps the light had now changed on a certain angle of the building and it had revealed a new pattern, a new texture, a new motif that I could play with to try and get a photo that I had not seen before from that landmark.
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That was the most important thing I wanted with the photography to match the fact that, and I said before I wasn't trying to match the photography in the writing, but now that I think about it in a way I was in that the writing is about things that you don't know about the landmark.
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So I also really wanted to make sure that the photography was as unique as possible and that I got angles of these landmarks that I would hope that people hadn't seen before in photography.
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After visiting over 60 countries, how has your definition of travel changed?
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I think for me, like when I started traveling, I definitely was more inclined towards a holiday.
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And it was literally just a break for me.
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And at the time I did, when I first started traveling by myself as an adult, I was working as a crime reporter at a daily newspaper, and it was an extremely pressure-filled job.
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And it was also a very quite a mentally and emotionally disturbing job because you're spending all day, every day writing about murders and rapes and car crashes and shark attacks and bushfires, and it's just wall-to-wall misery.
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So when I went on holiday, I really was like for a lot of people, they're looking for an escape.
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They're looking for a rest for their mind, for their soul.
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Whereas these days, as time has gone on, I have become more and more attracted to things that are more adventurous.
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And that doesn't necessarily mean climbing to the top of a mountain or getting a machete and hacking through a jungle.
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It means trying to have experiences that feel very different from my home city.
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Rather than going to a city and posting up in a five-star hotel and eating in fancy restaurants, I love getting out on the streets and walking around and trying to find unusual locations, trying to bump into local people and learn something new, trying to have interesting conversations with the taxi driver that's taking me from the airport to my hotel.
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So that's it, it's it almost feels like field work in a way, where I'm just trying to gather as much information, as much experiences as possible.
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And that was heavily influenced by the way that my father traveled as well.
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He was very adventurous in that way.
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So I've grown to mimic the way that he went about it all those years ago.
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Tell me a little bit more about that.
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What was it like growing up for you?
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Yeah, it was I had a great childhood here in Perth.
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It's a wonderful place to live.
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And my parents, fortunately, were both really into travel.
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My dad, in particular, was more passionate about travel than anyone I've ever met.
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It was extraordinary.
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And when he was a young guy, he took off in his 20s and travelled all through the Middle East and through Asia by himself and went through Afghanistan and all these kind of places.
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And so when we were young, then we started doing a lot of holidays as a family.
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And most of the time they were really quite adventurous holidays.
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We went to random islands in Indonesia that to this day are still barely touristed, let alone 35 years ago.
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And so that was always very interesting because my dad was a bit of a risk taker.
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So he'd sometimes book us into hotels that were quite shady, or he'd book us into a bus trip that's 12 hours through the mountains of a developing country or something like that.
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And that didn't always please my mum, but it certainly made me and my sister pretty excited.
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Were there moments during this project that challenged you either physically or emotionally?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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There was a lot.
00:22:00.529 --> 00:22:20.529
The pressure of having to execute so many photo shoots on such a tight timeline because in a matter of six to seven months needed to photograph, or nine months needed to photograph, you know, do photo shoots in 35 countries and then write the entire book as well, all by myself.
00:22:20.690 --> 00:22:34.210
So the pressure with the photo shoots when I was traveling is that if anything goes wrong, I was on such incredibly tight timelines in all these countries that if anything went wrong on the day, there was no second opportunity in a lot of times.
00:22:34.850 --> 00:22:41.490
There was times when I couldn't build in a second day into my schedule because I was having to go from country to country to country.
00:22:41.650 --> 00:22:48.370
I think on one trip that I did, I was in 14 countries in 17 or 18 days.
00:22:48.690 --> 00:22:58.850
So the pressure of arriving and just in a sense, you're a little bit in the hands of the gods of not knowing if something goes wrong, it could be completely out of your hands.
00:22:58.930 --> 00:23:00.850
You might have no ability to change it.
00:23:01.090 --> 00:23:03.890
And somehow everything just fell into place.
00:23:04.049 --> 00:23:07.809
Even like the one time when I was sure, okay, I'll finally come unstuck.
00:23:08.130 --> 00:23:11.970
I was doing a full circumnavigation of the world for one of these trips.
00:23:12.049 --> 00:23:19.170
And one of the last places I was in was in Argentina, and I was photographing the I still don't know how to pronounce it.
00:23:21.090 --> 00:23:21.809
I'm going to call it.
00:23:21.970 --> 00:23:24.610
I should know how to pronounce it, but that's pretty good pronunciation.
00:23:24.690 --> 00:23:25.330
That's close.
00:23:25.410 --> 00:23:26.049
Yeah.
00:23:27.650 --> 00:23:30.610
And so when I landed, that's in the middle of the jungle.
00:23:30.769 --> 00:23:32.769
So it's a tiny little airport you fly into.
00:23:32.850 --> 00:23:35.090
I flew in from Rio de Janeiro.
00:23:35.570 --> 00:23:43.890
And when I was when we were flying in, I could just see an almighty thunderstorm was just erupting over the jungle.
00:23:44.130 --> 00:23:47.410
And I was meant to be going to the falls that afternoon.
00:23:47.490 --> 00:23:51.330
And I was meant to be flying out the next morning to my next to Buenos Aires.
00:23:51.809 --> 00:23:57.809
And yeah, all the way driving from the airport to my hotel, it was some of the harshest rain I've ever seen in my life.
00:23:57.890 --> 00:24:01.970
And the taxi drivers telling me you're never going to get in there today, it'll be flooded.
00:24:02.210 --> 00:24:14.289
And somehow, by the time I got to the hotel, about an hour later, it cleared up, and the sun was out an hour after that, and I managed to just sneak in time in to get to the falls and to get all the photos done.
00:24:14.529 --> 00:24:17.650
So yeah, somehow along the way, things just worked out.
00:24:17.730 --> 00:24:30.210
But there was certainly there were so many moments where there's another 10 or 15 moments I could relay like that if we have the time, but there was a lot of times when it felt like as if I was about to come unstuck, but somehow I never did.
00:24:30.769 --> 00:24:35.410
You've been to more places in your lifetime than most of us will ever be.
00:24:35.890 --> 00:24:39.330
What is your global take on the state of the world?
00:24:40.850 --> 00:24:46.450
I think my global take on the state of the world is that nothing is anywhere near as bad as it seems to be.
00:24:46.690 --> 00:24:57.170
As someone who's been on the inside of the media, the media is remarkably good at selling you a narrative and then hammering home that narrative over and over again.
00:24:57.250 --> 00:24:58.850
And it's all about fear.
00:24:59.410 --> 00:25:05.490
One of the first things you learn as a journalist, as a newspaper journalist back in the day, is if it bleeds, it leads.
00:25:05.809 --> 00:25:10.690
Meaning that any kind of negative story, any kind of violence, that's what we want as a news story.
00:25:10.769 --> 00:25:12.529
We're not interested in the happy stuff.
00:25:12.690 --> 00:25:16.450
And so, yeah, there is a lot of disturbing things happening around the world at the moment.
00:25:16.529 --> 00:25:17.330
But guess what?
00:25:17.490 --> 00:25:23.330
There's also an extraordinary number of remarkably beautiful things that are happening that the media doesn't report.
00:25:23.410 --> 00:25:26.690
So when you're scrolling your phone, you're not seeing those things.
00:25:26.930 --> 00:25:33.250
You're just seeing 50 headlines that are telling you about the same event that occurred today that you've already heard about.
00:25:33.650 --> 00:25:35.330
That was crap.
00:25:35.490 --> 00:25:36.850
It was terrible.
00:25:37.090 --> 00:25:43.090
But you've already read about it, and the media just keeps inundating you over and over again with all this negativity.
00:25:43.330 --> 00:25:48.049
And then you walk out your front door, and do you walk into a war zone?
00:25:48.289 --> 00:25:51.170
Sorry, I just I saw my battery just started flashing there.
00:25:51.250 --> 00:25:52.690
So I'm just quickly from meeting.
00:25:53.250 --> 00:25:55.490
But you're not walking out your yeah.
00:25:55.650 --> 00:26:02.850
When if when people I would say this, when people start panicking about the state of the world, put your phone down, walk outside.
00:26:03.009 --> 00:26:07.490
If you've got a dog, take him for a walk, go to the park, have a chat with someone you bump into.
00:26:07.650 --> 00:26:11.490
By the time you get home, you'll be thinking, what was I thinking before?
00:26:11.570 --> 00:26:14.289
Like the world, the real world is out there outside your door.
00:26:14.370 --> 00:26:16.130
It's not the crap on your phone.
00:26:16.289 --> 00:26:24.210
As much as there are events that are disturbing that are taking place, they are only a minute part of what our overall experience is.
00:26:24.370 --> 00:26:30.370
And don't let the media force you to always focus on those negative negative things.
00:26:31.570 --> 00:26:36.850
Is that the takeaway that you hope people will have with their encounter with Hidden in Plainsight?
00:26:38.289 --> 00:26:46.610
A little bit in that tangentially to that, that what you're seeing isn't always the full story.
00:26:46.690 --> 00:26:54.850
So when you're going to these landmarks, I want to for the book to expose you to a completely different element of it.
00:26:55.090 --> 00:27:05.809
And in a lot of these cases, too, some of these stories are also very instructive that they will give you a much better understanding of perhaps why that landmark is so revered locally.
00:27:05.970 --> 00:27:16.049
It's not just because it's beautiful, it's because it's also shaped the culture, the history, the spirituality in a in an incredibly diverse number of ways.
00:27:16.289 --> 00:27:25.650
So, yeah, that's one thing I would love people to take away is that these landmarks are so much more than just a beautiful building, a beautiful temple, a beautiful waterfall.
00:27:25.809 --> 00:27:33.570
There is so much depth through it, and there's so much beauty within them that has nothing to do with what they look like.
00:27:33.809 --> 00:27:34.049
Yeah.
00:27:34.289 --> 00:27:37.809
That's what I would love for people to take away from the book.
00:27:38.289 --> 00:27:46.130
The book is Hidden in Plain Sight: the Untold Mysteries, Myths, and Marvels of the world's most popular landmarks.
00:27:46.289 --> 00:27:49.330
And it was written by our special guest, Ronan O'Connell.
00:27:49.410 --> 00:27:50.610
Ronan, this has been great.
00:27:50.690 --> 00:27:52.049
Thanks so much for the conversation.
00:27:52.289 --> 00:27:54.769
Yeah, thank you so much, Terry, for giving me your time.
00:27:55.090 --> 00:27:59.330
In Conversation with Terry Shepard is a copyrighted presentation.
00:27:59.570 --> 00:28:00.930
All rights reserved.
00:28:01.090 --> 00:28:02.450
I'm Lisa Davis.
00:28:02.610 --> 00:28:06.049
Join Terry Shepard next time in Conversation.
00:00:35.169 --> 00:00:48.129
In conversation with Terry Shepard, award-winning broadcaster, narrator, and author, a deep dive into the writer's craft with the artists and support systems who create the stories we love.
00:00:48.369 --> 00:00:58.129
There is a moment every traveler knows standing before something iconic, camera in hand, convinced you understand what you're seeing.
00:00:58.369 --> 00:01:11.890
And yet, just beneath the surface of the world's most photographed places are stories far stranger, darker, and more extraordinary than any guidebook ever lets on.
00:01:12.210 --> 00:01:22.930
Ronan O'Connell has spent more than two decades circling the globe, visiting over 60 countries in pursuit of stories that linger long after the journey ends.
00:01:23.250 --> 00:01:35.650
A contributor to the National Geographic and a byline you've seen in outlets from CNN to the BBC, he brings a journalist's rigor and a storyteller's curiosity to every destination.
00:01:35.890 --> 00:01:53.489
In his new book, Hidden in Plain Sight, The Untold Mysteries, Myths, and Marvels of the World's Most Popular Landmarks, he peels back the familiar to uncover revolutions, legends, and secrets hiding in plain view.
00:01:53.730 --> 00:02:00.370
It's a reminder that travel isn't just about where we go, but how deeply we're willing to see.
00:02:00.609 --> 00:02:03.489
Ronan O'Connell joins us from Australia today.
00:02:03.649 --> 00:02:05.250
It's great to be with you, my friend.
00:02:05.329 --> 00:02:06.450
Thanks so much.
00:02:06.769 --> 00:02:08.129
Thank you very much, Terry.
00:02:08.209 --> 00:02:09.490
That was quite an introduction.
00:02:09.569 --> 00:02:10.530
I appreciate it.
00:02:10.769 --> 00:02:14.289
What motivated you writing the book?
00:02:15.409 --> 00:02:17.250
It came out of the blue, to be honest.
00:02:17.409 --> 00:02:23.889
I was approached by Harper Collins a couple of years ago, and I, up until that point, I'd never thought about writing a book.
00:02:23.969 --> 00:02:25.730
I hadn't pitched a book to anyone.
00:02:25.889 --> 00:02:28.689
I was very busy doing my freelance journalism.
00:02:28.849 --> 00:02:45.969
And they Harper Collins approached me and said that they had been keeping track of my work for National Geographic and that they liked the style of travel writing that I tended to do, which was a little bit offbeat, focusing on unusual kind of stories or untold elements of history.
00:02:46.129 --> 00:02:56.770
And so they just said, look, could you come up with some ideas for coffee table style travel books that are along that line, that are a bit unusual, something we haven't necessarily seen before?
00:02:57.009 --> 00:03:00.609
And so I went away and I came up with a range of ideas.
00:03:00.849 --> 00:03:04.210
And luckily enough, they decided that they like two of those ideas.
00:03:04.289 --> 00:03:10.770
And so they signed me to a two-book deal, the first of which is now being released, hidden in plain sight.
00:03:11.009 --> 00:03:18.770
And so the idea for the book, they basically said, look, it the brief for coming up with ideas of what they were interested in.
00:03:18.849 --> 00:03:24.930
They said, we want something that's unusual, that's a bit offbeat, because there's a lot of coffee table travel books out there.
00:03:25.009 --> 00:03:30.050
We need something that doesn't just mimic them, but it also needs to be marketable as well.
00:03:30.129 --> 00:03:31.650
It can't be too niche.
00:03:32.050 --> 00:03:38.050
And so that was where I came up for the idea of, okay, what if we look at the world's most famous landmarks to make it very marketable?
00:03:38.129 --> 00:03:45.009
And so you can have on the cover, if need be, the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, so that people will recognize what you're writing about.
00:03:45.250 --> 00:04:01.490
But then let's do what I had often done throughout my travel journalism, which was to try and unearth an angle to a location that either hadn't been written about before or hadn't been written about very widely, particularly in a travel context.
00:04:01.810 --> 00:04:05.569
So yeah, that was then how I came up with this idea for hidden in plain sight.
00:04:05.650 --> 00:04:24.050
I basically picked a range of the world's most famous landmarks and then just spent time digging into their history, digging into their design, the archaeology, perhaps anthropology that's linked to them, to try and find anything that I felt was unknown about those locations.
00:04:24.210 --> 00:04:38.370
And then in a lot of cases as well, just to make sure that it wasn't just that it was unknown to me, I also sounded out people from those cities to try and run it by them and find out whether or not this was something that even locals were not aware of.
00:04:38.449 --> 00:04:43.329
And in most of the cases, it was something that a lot of locals even were not familiar with.
00:04:43.490 --> 00:04:50.289
The reason being that a lot of these locations, these landmarks, are centuries, sometimes even millennia old.
00:04:50.529 --> 00:05:02.370
So within that incredibly long time frame, there's always going to be an extraordinary number of events that are very notable and which you they can't all be catalogued in the public sphere.
00:05:02.449 --> 00:05:04.050
They can't all be well known.
00:05:04.209 --> 00:05:09.009
There's always rich fodder there to be able to dig into, and that was what I did with the book.
00:05:09.490 --> 00:05:13.490
Travel journalism sounds like a dream gig.
00:05:13.730 --> 00:05:17.730
How did you become a professional in that role?
00:05:18.689 --> 00:05:20.449
I actually just fell into it.
00:05:20.689 --> 00:05:23.089
Similar with the book, where it just fell out of the blue.
00:05:23.170 --> 00:05:24.370
I wasn't planning to do it.
00:05:24.449 --> 00:05:27.649
I'd never thought about being a travel journalist or planned to do it.
00:05:27.889 --> 00:05:37.170
I went to university to do print journalism and had always wanted to be a news journalist, focusing on politics and crime and those kinds of things.
00:05:37.329 --> 00:05:43.009
So I worked for nine years after university at daily newspapers here in Perth.
00:05:43.170 --> 00:05:49.569
And I spent seven years at what was then the second biggest newspaper in Australia, which was called The West Australian.
00:05:49.730 --> 00:05:52.930
And I did as I had planned to do from my university days.
00:05:53.009 --> 00:05:56.050
I focused on reporting on crime and politics.
00:05:56.290 --> 00:06:03.410
And then when I was about to turn 30, I decided that I, while I still had the chance, I wanted to go out and explore the world.
00:06:03.490 --> 00:06:14.930
And one thing I'd always wanted to do was to go and move and live in Ireland because both my parents are from Ireland and I have all these cousins and aunties and my my half-brother who lives there as well.
00:06:15.170 --> 00:06:19.969
And I also, before doing that, I wanted to go traveling in Asia for a few months.
00:06:20.129 --> 00:06:22.529
So I quit my job at the West Australian.
00:06:22.930 --> 00:06:27.009
I was traveling through Asia for a few months en route to moving to Europe.
00:06:27.250 --> 00:06:35.490
And near the end of that time in Asia, I met a delightful young woman who's now my wife while I was traveling through Thailand.
00:06:35.810 --> 00:06:45.569
And after a few months, I moved back to sorry, while I was in Thailand, I spent a couple of weeks with her.
00:06:45.730 --> 00:06:50.610
And then basically we said goodbye and we said, look, you know, both of each other, good luck in your life.
00:06:50.769 --> 00:06:52.290
And I went and moved to Europe.
00:06:52.370 --> 00:06:55.329
But we then started chatting every day on Skype.
00:06:55.410 --> 00:07:01.170
And after a few months, I decided that I was going to take another risk, like I'd done by quitting my job in Perth.
00:07:01.250 --> 00:07:05.490
And I was going to ask her if she'd come traveling through Asia with me for a few months.
00:07:05.810 --> 00:07:07.569
And she said yes.
00:07:07.810 --> 00:07:11.250
And so we went on a huge adventure for about two months through Asia.
00:07:11.329 --> 00:07:15.649
And by the end of that, we were just we were very closely connected.
00:07:15.810 --> 00:07:21.730
And so I decided then that I was going to move to Thailand so that I could continue the relationship with her.
00:07:21.969 --> 00:07:24.209
And at that point, I had to find a way to make money.
00:07:24.610 --> 00:07:27.170
I'd been burning through all my savings that I'd done in Perth.
00:07:27.329 --> 00:07:32.610
So I now had to get a job, and freelance journalism was the obvious route.
00:07:32.930 --> 00:07:38.290
And I started doing writing a little bit about cricket, which was one of my favorite sports, and travel.
00:07:38.370 --> 00:07:41.969
And it was the travel that I enjoyed much more than writing about cricket.
00:07:42.449 --> 00:07:47.329
So next thing I knew, that was just my profession, and it's all gone from there.
00:07:47.810 --> 00:07:49.810
Our special guest is Ronan O'Connell.
00:07:49.889 --> 00:07:51.329
He's a journalist and an author.
00:07:51.490 --> 00:08:00.050
His new book is Hidden in Plain Sight: The Untold Mysteries, Myths, and Marvels of the World's Most Popular Landmarks.
00:08:00.290 --> 00:08:04.769
You describe hidden in plain sight as a way of seeing the world.
00:08:05.089 --> 00:08:10.129
What do most of us miss when we visit these iconic landmarks?
00:08:11.410 --> 00:08:24.209
I think what happens with a lot of these places is that people get a very basic overview of it, of the history of it, or of the design of it, or of any unique stories related to it.
00:08:24.529 --> 00:08:29.569
Because for the most part these days, people get their information about tourist sites online.
00:08:30.370 --> 00:08:33.410
People don't really use the guidebooks as much anymore, unfortunately.
00:08:33.569 --> 00:08:52.289
The guidebooks like Lonely Planets and Fromers and these kind of guidebooks, there's so much care and detail put into those things that the information that you're reading, A, is 100% accurate, but B is also quite layered and gives you better context about the importance of that particular landmark within the city, within the country.
00:08:52.370 --> 00:09:01.250
Whereas these days, people don't want to be carrying around guidebooks, understandably, they get it from their phone and they tend to just pick whatever is the first link that comes up on their phone.
00:09:01.410 --> 00:09:11.730
So they type in Eiffel Tower history, and it could just be a blog that's paid for very strong search engine optimization to make sure that they're the top that comes up on Google.
00:09:11.890 --> 00:09:14.690
But a lot of these websites, there's no fact-checking.
00:09:14.849 --> 00:09:17.970
A lot of them they literally just copy and paste from other blogs.
00:09:18.130 --> 00:09:25.730
And so what happens is that the same descriptions of the Eiffel Tower are basically replicated on about a hundred different blogs.
00:09:25.970 --> 00:09:33.890
All of them are very skin deep and often, as I said, inaccurate rundowns of the history and designs of these landmarks.
00:09:34.130 --> 00:09:39.569
And so people just get a little bit of information and then they think, okay, I've got a sense of it now.
00:09:39.730 --> 00:09:42.130
And then they'd go and explore the location.
00:09:42.369 --> 00:09:43.490
And that's fine.
00:09:43.809 --> 00:09:48.369
You don't necessarily have to really delve into a location.
00:09:48.769 --> 00:09:53.329
You don't need to really understand a landmark to be able to have a great time and appreciate it.
00:09:53.410 --> 00:10:01.490
And for a lot of people, when they're traveling, they actually, especially if they've got a particularly stressful life back at home, they just want to switch off.
00:10:01.730 --> 00:10:10.609
So I can understand 100% people just going to a location and just appreciating it for what they see, for what they hear, they smell.
00:10:10.849 --> 00:10:22.289
But yeah, specific to what you're asking, I do feel that now that there is a bit of a paucity of quality information out there about many landmarks and many locations.
00:10:22.450 --> 00:10:38.049
And so even people that are quite interested and would like to know quality information about that location often will end up getting something that's that may not be accurate or maybe quite derivative and just repeats what they've heard a million times before about the Eiffel Tower.
00:10:38.210 --> 00:10:56.210
That was part of what I wanted to do with the book was to try and give people information that I felt would be completely new to them and would give them a totally fresh perspective on that landmark, which even if they visited it many times, that they would read this and think, wow, I had no idea about any of this.
00:10:56.609 --> 00:11:02.690
With so many amazing places to see in the world, how did you decide which ones to include in the book?
00:11:03.329 --> 00:11:05.490
I had a very long list to start with.
00:11:05.650 --> 00:11:22.289
I probably had about 50 landmarks that I was picking, and then I also had to I had to whittle it down a bit based on locations that I felt I could also get to safely because I wrote and photographed the book, like I did all the photo shoots myself.
00:11:22.529 --> 00:11:29.890
So traveling around the world like that totally by myself, I don't have a handler with me, I don't have an interpreter.
00:11:30.849 --> 00:11:38.690
The locations that I picked were also shaped a bit by how safe it would be for me in that location, also how easy it would be for me to get visas.
00:11:38.849 --> 00:11:43.410
Is it a country that is safe for journalists or is it a country that causes problems for journalists?
00:11:43.650 --> 00:11:59.170
So unfortunately, there was a number of locations that I would have loved to include in the book, but it was just a little bit too risky to go there, particularly on a very short time frame of trying to travel to, you know, I traveled to 35 or 36 countries to do photo shoots for this book.
00:11:59.410 --> 00:12:01.490
So that had a big influence on it.
00:12:01.569 --> 00:12:04.930
So I whittled it down from 50 to about 35, 36.
00:12:05.009 --> 00:12:09.170
I traveled to all of those landmarks, which were all of which were in different countries.
00:12:09.250 --> 00:12:11.490
So it was 35, 36 countries.
00:12:11.650 --> 00:12:15.650
And from there it got whittled down further to about 23 for the book.
00:12:15.809 --> 00:12:19.890
In a number of instances, we had to remove some due to photo permit issues.
00:12:20.049 --> 00:12:26.289
And in other times, it was that perhaps HarperCollins felt that some of the chapters were a touch too similar, and so we removed some.
00:12:26.529 --> 00:12:34.049
But it was quite daunting looking at all these landmarks around the world and trying to work out, okay, which ones should I include.
00:12:34.210 --> 00:12:39.890
But yeah, in the end, uh I was also very keen to get as many different corners of the world included as possible.
00:12:40.049 --> 00:12:45.569
So I felt that in the end we got a really nice mix of countries and cultures that are included in the book.
00:12:45.890 --> 00:12:47.890
Ronan O'Connell is our special guest.
00:12:47.970 --> 00:12:55.329
We're talking about hidden in plain sight, the untold mysteries, myths, and marvels of the world's most popular landmarks.
00:12:55.650 --> 00:13:05.490
What was your process for separating fact from myth, especially when dealing with folklore and supernatural stories?
00:13:06.769 --> 00:13:12.450
Yeah, some of the stories that are in the book are just straight related to legend and mythology.
00:13:12.529 --> 00:13:32.769
And so obviously, with the way you write it, you make it clear to the reader that this is something that is not confirmed, it's not factual, it's something that is really almost like a fireplace kind of story, but in such a more sophisticated way that it's been crafted specifically to reveal things about a religion or a culture or a country.
00:13:32.930 --> 00:13:37.970
And I had written a lot about mythology and legends in my work previously.
00:13:38.049 --> 00:13:46.130
It was something that I'd specialized in was finding a way to weave mythology into travel stories.
00:13:46.289 --> 00:14:00.210
And I liked writing stories that explain to people as well how if they were interested in a particular type of mythology or tale, legend about a country of how they could actually go on a trip that would trace those locations through that country.
00:14:00.450 --> 00:14:09.970
So yeah, then obviously, as well, as you're going along, there's a lot of fact-checking you've got to do because at times you'd come across some story and you'd think, wow, this is an incredible story.
00:14:10.210 --> 00:14:18.130
And a couple of hours later, once you really get deep into the research, you'd start to question it and go, Oh, I'm not sure how reliable perhaps this story is.
00:14:18.369 --> 00:14:23.890
So there was a lot of times when I researched, took me down what turned out to be dead ends.
00:14:24.130 --> 00:14:40.849
So yeah, there was a there was just an enormous amount of research in the book and just constantly needing to confirm whether things are true or not, and then often finding that I'd need to switch tack and maybe ditch a particular topic or a chapter, because as it turned out, it wasn't quite what it appeared at first.
00:14:41.809 --> 00:14:49.650
It is said that once we become travelers, we are forever changed in our outlook towards the world and towards ourselves.
00:14:49.890 --> 00:14:52.210
How has travel changed you?
00:14:53.410 --> 00:14:58.450
It certainly made me appreciate Australia and Perth, the city that I'm from, a lot more.
00:14:58.690 --> 00:15:00.130
I was born and raised here.
00:15:00.210 --> 00:15:02.769
I lived my whole life here until I was 30.
00:15:03.089 --> 00:15:06.049
And it was very easy to get complacent.
00:15:06.130 --> 00:15:13.809
And when you're used to a certain lifestyle, a certain freedom, certain levels of safety, you take them for granted, whether you intend to or not.
00:15:14.049 --> 00:15:33.569
So for me, traveling around the world and seeing the fact that people in so many countries did not have the kind of freedom or the access to beautiful parks and to free schools and to a good healthcare system, it yeah, it made me so much more appreciative.
00:15:33.650 --> 00:15:39.809
And it also made me a little bit guilty, to be honest, for not appreciating it as much as I should have earlier in life.
00:15:40.049 --> 00:16:06.289
But it also just it the big thing that it's done for me is it's made me much more interested in history, in anthropology, and that has flowed through to me having a much greater interest in Aboriginal Australian culture, in our indigenous culture, which when I was growing up in my schools, I wasn't taught a lot about, unfortunately, because of growing up in the 1990s.
00:16:06.450 --> 00:16:14.450
Unfortunately, Australia wasn't progressive enough yet to be teaching us enough about Aboriginal education, which fortunately now has changed.
00:16:14.609 --> 00:16:20.930
I've got a six-year-old boy who's in school and they get taught so much about indigenous culture here in Australia.
00:16:21.009 --> 00:16:22.369
So that's a wonderful change.
00:16:22.529 --> 00:16:58.210
But it's been interesting that going to other parts of the world and finding all of these incredible strands of anthropology in these countries and learning about cultures in different ways has then made me realize that I grew up with perhaps the oldest continuous civilization in the entire world, a 60,000-year-old culture that was right under my nose that I unfortunately had never paid enough attention to, but now I do, and I'm just endlessly fascinated by Indigenous Australian culture, and it forms one of my favorite chapters in the book.
00:16:59.089 --> 00:17:04.529
One of the fascinating things about the book is your visual storytelling.
00:17:04.609 --> 00:17:07.490
You have over 150 beautiful photographs.
00:17:07.730 --> 00:17:13.329
How do you balance the visual storytelling with historical narrative in a book like this?
00:17:14.769 --> 00:17:19.730
I think for me, I just basically kept the two things separate.
00:17:19.970 --> 00:17:25.329
I didn't ever think about trying to write it to match the photos or take photos to match the writing.
00:17:25.569 --> 00:17:27.250
I just went to these locations.
00:17:27.410 --> 00:17:31.250
When I was traveling and going to these locations, it was all about the photography.
00:17:31.329 --> 00:17:37.890
I just had my photographer's hat on and I was just trying to shoot the most beautiful photos that I possibly could.
00:17:38.049 --> 00:17:44.930
And similar to with my writing, I was always looking to try and photograph these locations from a different angle.
00:17:45.090 --> 00:17:50.690
And that's also why before I went to all of these landmarks, I never looked at photography of them.
00:17:50.850 --> 00:18:01.570
I didn't go on Instagram to look at how other people were photographing them because I did not want to find myself influenced or just copying what other people had done, as beautiful as their photography may be.
00:18:01.650 --> 00:18:05.250
I really wanted to go there with fresh eyes and try and capture different angles.
00:18:05.410 --> 00:18:27.090
So yeah, I basically I'd go to these landmarks and just walk around and just do circles and circles, even when I felt I'd exhausted every option, just to see if perhaps the light had now changed on a certain angle of the building and it had revealed a new pattern, a new texture, a new motif that I could play with to try and get a photo that I had not seen before from that landmark.
00:18:27.250 --> 00:18:42.049
That was the most important thing I wanted with the photography to match the fact that, and I said before I wasn't trying to match the photography in the writing, but now that I think about it in a way I was in that the writing is about things that you don't know about the landmark.
00:18:42.289 --> 00:18:53.650
So I also really wanted to make sure that the photography was as unique as possible and that I got angles of these landmarks that I would hope that people hadn't seen before in photography.
00:18:53.970 --> 00:18:59.570
After visiting over 60 countries, how has your definition of travel changed?
00:19:01.250 --> 00:19:07.650
I think for me, like when I started traveling, I definitely was more inclined towards a holiday.
00:19:07.890 --> 00:19:10.210
And it was literally just a break for me.
00:19:10.289 --> 00:19:20.769
And at the time I did, when I first started traveling by myself as an adult, I was working as a crime reporter at a daily newspaper, and it was an extremely pressure-filled job.
00:19:20.930 --> 00:19:36.130
And it was also a very quite a mentally and emotionally disturbing job because you're spending all day, every day writing about murders and rapes and car crashes and shark attacks and bushfires, and it's just wall-to-wall misery.
00:19:36.289 --> 00:19:41.890
So when I went on holiday, I really was like for a lot of people, they're looking for an escape.
00:19:42.049 --> 00:19:45.330
They're looking for a rest for their mind, for their soul.
00:19:45.570 --> 00:19:53.250
Whereas these days, as time has gone on, I have become more and more attracted to things that are more adventurous.
00:19:53.410 --> 00:19:58.769
And that doesn't necessarily mean climbing to the top of a mountain or getting a machete and hacking through a jungle.
00:19:59.009 --> 00:20:04.210
It means trying to have experiences that feel very different from my home city.
00:20:04.450 --> 00:20:25.809
Rather than going to a city and posting up in a five-star hotel and eating in fancy restaurants, I love getting out on the streets and walking around and trying to find unusual locations, trying to bump into local people and learn something new, trying to have interesting conversations with the taxi driver that's taking me from the airport to my hotel.
00:20:25.970 --> 00:20:34.690
So that's it, it's it almost feels like field work in a way, where I'm just trying to gather as much information, as much experiences as possible.
00:20:34.769 --> 00:20:38.289
And that was heavily influenced by the way that my father traveled as well.
00:20:38.529 --> 00:20:40.130
He was very adventurous in that way.
00:20:40.289 --> 00:20:44.370
So I've grown to mimic the way that he went about it all those years ago.
00:20:44.769 --> 00:20:46.210
Tell me a little bit more about that.
00:20:46.370 --> 00:20:48.210
What was it like growing up for you?
00:20:49.570 --> 00:20:52.690
Yeah, it was I had a great childhood here in Perth.
00:20:52.769 --> 00:20:53.970
It's a wonderful place to live.
00:20:54.049 --> 00:20:57.330
And my parents, fortunately, were both really into travel.
00:20:57.650 --> 00:21:01.970
My dad, in particular, was more passionate about travel than anyone I've ever met.
00:21:02.130 --> 00:21:03.410
It was extraordinary.
00:21:03.650 --> 00:21:14.370
And when he was a young guy, he took off in his 20s and travelled all through the Middle East and through Asia by himself and went through Afghanistan and all these kind of places.
00:21:14.529 --> 00:21:19.650
And so when we were young, then we started doing a lot of holidays as a family.
00:21:19.890 --> 00:21:23.009
And most of the time they were really quite adventurous holidays.
00:21:23.250 --> 00:21:30.289
We went to random islands in Indonesia that to this day are still barely touristed, let alone 35 years ago.
00:21:30.450 --> 00:21:36.450
And so that was always very interesting because my dad was a bit of a risk taker.
00:21:36.529 --> 00:21:45.730
So he'd sometimes book us into hotels that were quite shady, or he'd book us into a bus trip that's 12 hours through the mountains of a developing country or something like that.
00:21:45.890 --> 00:21:51.170
And that didn't always please my mum, but it certainly made me and my sister pretty excited.
00:21:51.570 --> 00:21:56.930
Were there moments during this project that challenged you either physically or emotionally?
00:21:58.450 --> 00:21:59.570
Yeah, absolutely.
00:21:59.650 --> 00:22:00.370
There was a lot.
00:22:00.529 --> 00:22:20.529
The pressure of having to execute so many photo shoots on such a tight timeline because in a matter of six to seven months needed to photograph, or nine months needed to photograph, you know, do photo shoots in 35 countries and then write the entire book as well, all by myself.
00:22:20.690 --> 00:22:34.210
So the pressure with the photo shoots when I was traveling is that if anything goes wrong, I was on such incredibly tight timelines in all these countries that if anything went wrong on the day, there was no second opportunity in a lot of times.
00:22:34.850 --> 00:22:41.490
There was times when I couldn't build in a second day into my schedule because I was having to go from country to country to country.
00:22:41.650 --> 00:22:48.370
I think on one trip that I did, I was in 14 countries in 17 or 18 days.
00:22:48.690 --> 00:22:58.850
So the pressure of arriving and just in a sense, you're a little bit in the hands of the gods of not knowing if something goes wrong, it could be completely out of your hands.
00:22:58.930 --> 00:23:00.850
You might have no ability to change it.
00:23:01.090 --> 00:23:03.890
And somehow everything just fell into place.
00:23:04.049 --> 00:23:07.809
Even like the one time when I was sure, okay, I'll finally come unstuck.
00:23:08.130 --> 00:23:11.970
I was doing a full circumnavigation of the world for one of these trips.
00:23:12.049 --> 00:23:19.170
And one of the last places I was in was in Argentina, and I was photographing the I still don't know how to pronounce it.
00:23:21.090 --> 00:23:21.809
I'm going to call it.
00:23:21.970 --> 00:23:24.610
I should know how to pronounce it, but that's pretty good pronunciation.
00:23:24.690 --> 00:23:25.330
That's close.
00:23:25.410 --> 00:23:26.049
Yeah.
00:23:27.650 --> 00:23:30.610
And so when I landed, that's in the middle of the jungle.
00:23:30.769 --> 00:23:32.769
So it's a tiny little airport you fly into.
00:23:32.850 --> 00:23:35.090
I flew in from Rio de Janeiro.
00:23:35.570 --> 00:23:43.890
And when I was when we were flying in, I could just see an almighty thunderstorm was just erupting over the jungle.
00:23:44.130 --> 00:23:47.410
And I was meant to be going to the falls that afternoon.
00:23:47.490 --> 00:23:51.330
And I was meant to be flying out the next morning to my next to Buenos Aires.
00:23:51.809 --> 00:23:57.809
And yeah, all the way driving from the airport to my hotel, it was some of the harshest rain I've ever seen in my life.
00:23:57.890 --> 00:24:01.970
And the taxi drivers telling me you're never going to get in there today, it'll be flooded.
00:24:02.210 --> 00:24:14.289
And somehow, by the time I got to the hotel, about an hour later, it cleared up, and the sun was out an hour after that, and I managed to just sneak in time in to get to the falls and to get all the photos done.
00:24:14.529 --> 00:24:17.650
So yeah, somehow along the way, things just worked out.
00:24:17.730 --> 00:24:30.210
But there was certainly there were so many moments where there's another 10 or 15 moments I could relay like that if we have the time, but there was a lot of times when it felt like as if I was about to come unstuck, but somehow I never did.
00:24:30.769 --> 00:24:35.410
You've been to more places in your lifetime than most of us will ever be.
00:24:35.890 --> 00:24:39.330
What is your global take on the state of the world?
00:24:40.850 --> 00:24:46.450
I think my global take on the state of the world is that nothing is anywhere near as bad as it seems to be.
00:24:46.690 --> 00:24:57.170
As someone who's been on the inside of the media, the media is remarkably good at selling you a narrative and then hammering home that narrative over and over again.
00:24:57.250 --> 00:24:58.850
And it's all about fear.
00:24:59.410 --> 00:25:05.490
One of the first things you learn as a journalist, as a newspaper journalist back in the day, is if it bleeds, it leads.
00:25:05.809 --> 00:25:10.690
Meaning that any kind of negative story, any kind of violence, that's what we want as a news story.
00:25:10.769 --> 00:25:12.529
We're not interested in the happy stuff.
00:25:12.690 --> 00:25:16.450
And so, yeah, there is a lot of disturbing things happening around the world at the moment.
00:25:16.529 --> 00:25:17.330
But guess what?
00:25:17.490 --> 00:25:23.330
There's also an extraordinary number of remarkably beautiful things that are happening that the media doesn't report.
00:25:23.410 --> 00:25:26.690
So when you're scrolling your phone, you're not seeing those things.
00:25:26.930 --> 00:25:33.250
You're just seeing 50 headlines that are telling you about the same event that occurred today that you've already heard about.
00:25:33.650 --> 00:25:35.330
That was crap.
00:25:35.490 --> 00:25:36.850
It was terrible.
00:25:37.090 --> 00:25:43.090
But you've already read about it, and the media just keeps inundating you over and over again with all this negativity.
00:25:43.330 --> 00:25:48.049
And then you walk out your front door, and do you walk into a war zone?
00:25:48.289 --> 00:25:51.170
Sorry, I just I saw my battery just started flashing there.
00:25:51.250 --> 00:25:52.690
So I'm just quickly from meeting.
00:25:53.250 --> 00:25:55.490
But you're not walking out your yeah.
00:25:55.650 --> 00:26:02.850
When if when people I would say this, when people start panicking about the state of the world, put your phone down, walk outside.
00:26:03.009 --> 00:26:07.490
If you've got a dog, take him for a walk, go to the park, have a chat with someone you bump into.
00:26:07.650 --> 00:26:11.490
By the time you get home, you'll be thinking, what was I thinking before?
00:26:11.570 --> 00:26:14.289
Like the world, the real world is out there outside your door.
00:26:14.370 --> 00:26:16.130
It's not the crap on your phone.
00:26:16.289 --> 00:26:24.210
As much as there are events that are disturbing that are taking place, they are only a minute part of what our overall experience is.
00:26:24.370 --> 00:26:30.370
And don't let the media force you to always focus on those negative negative things.
00:26:31.570 --> 00:26:36.850
Is that the takeaway that you hope people will have with their encounter with Hidden in Plainsight?
00:26:38.289 --> 00:26:46.610
A little bit in that tangentially to that, that what you're seeing isn't always the full story.
00:26:46.690 --> 00:26:54.850
So when you're going to these landmarks, I want to for the book to expose you to a completely different element of it.
00:26:55.090 --> 00:27:05.809
And in a lot of these cases, too, some of these stories are also very instructive that they will give you a much better understanding of perhaps why that landmark is so revered locally.
00:27:05.970 --> 00:27:16.049
It's not just because it's beautiful, it's because it's also shaped the culture, the history, the spirituality in a in an incredibly diverse number of ways.
00:27:16.289 --> 00:27:25.650
So, yeah, that's one thing I would love people to take away is that these landmarks are so much more than just a beautiful building, a beautiful temple, a beautiful waterfall.
00:27:25.809 --> 00:27:33.570
There is so much depth through it, and there's so much beauty within them that has nothing to do with what they look like.
00:27:33.809 --> 00:27:34.049
Yeah.
00:27:34.289 --> 00:27:37.809
That's what I would love for people to take away from the book.
00:27:38.289 --> 00:27:46.130
The book is Hidden in Plain Sight: the Untold Mysteries, Myths, and Marvels of the world's most popular landmarks.
00:27:46.289 --> 00:27:49.330
And it was written by our special guest, Ronan O'Connell.
00:27:49.410 --> 00:27:50.610
Ronan, this has been great.
00:27:50.690 --> 00:27:52.049
Thanks so much for the conversation.
00:27:52.289 --> 00:27:54.769
Yeah, thank you so much, Terry, for giving me your time.
00:27:55.090 --> 00:27:59.330
In Conversation with Terry Shepard is a copyrighted presentation.
00:27:59.570 --> 00:28:00.930
All rights reserved.
00:28:01.090 --> 00:28:02.450
I'm Lisa Davis.
00:28:02.610 --> 00:28:06.049
Join Terry Shepard next time in Conversation.
