What do you get when you mix a giant desert mystery, a bug 🐛 thought to be gone forever, and a guest world explorer who’s seen it all? An adventure like no other! Join Sergio, Mimsy, and special guest Dylan Thuras (author and co-founder of Atlas Obscura) as they journey through Australia’s most surprising stories, and discover how curiosity can turn the whole world into a playground of wonder. You can find "The Atlas Obscura Explorer's Guide for The World's Most Adventurous Kid" HERE: https://www.atlasobscura.com/unique-gifts/atlas-obscura-kids-book
What do you get when you mix a giant desert mystery, a bug 🐛 thought to be gone forever, and a guest world explorer who’s seen it all? An adventure like no other! Join Sergio, Mimsy, and special guest Dylan Thuras (author and co-founder of Atlas Obscura) as they journey through Australia’s most surprising stories, and discover how curiosity can turn the whole world into a playground of wonder.
You can find "The Atlas Obscura Explorer's Guide for The World's Most Adventurous Kid" HERE
SERGIO: Hi there. I’m Sergio, the Accent Explorer. And this is my best buddy Mimsy. She’s a Mockingbird, which means she is great at copying sounds from all over the world. So If I wanted to say hello to her in Spanish, do you know what word I would use?
MIMSY: Hola!
SERGIO: Exactly. Explorer, can you wave your wing and say it too? Ready? Hola! (pause). Now we have something really unique and fascinating to share with you today. You see, I just got a call from my favorite librarian, Ms Mclaughlin. She’s the one that helped my friend Ava unlock the secret behind her surname. If you missed that episode, you can always go back and listen to it once you finish here!
Anyway, Ms McLaughlin explained to me that her friend Dylan Thuras, a famous author and the co-founder of the travel company Atlas Obscura, is visiting the library later this morning! How exciting is that! She said Dylan knows all about traveling the globe, and he’s even written a kids’ book filled with amazing places, including a few right in Australia…we’ll learn more about that soon! She even asked if I’d like to meet him. Of course I said YES! So Mimsy and I wrote up some questions for Dylan …and walked – or, in Mimsy’s case “flew” – over to the library. And that’s where we are now!
MIMSY: Ahh, I love the smell of books!
SERGIO: Me too, Mimsy. Mmmm…smells like adventure! And hey, there’s Ms McLaughlin! She has a fun looking book in her hand. I wonder what it is. Hello, Ms McLaughlin! What have you got there?
MS MCLAUGHLIN: Hello Sergio! This is Dylan’s book. It’s called “Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for The World’s Most Adventurous Kid”. It tell us about 100 extraordinary places across 47 countries.
SERGIO: 100 places? Whoa! That’s enough adventures to fill a whole passport.
MS MCLAUGHLIN: Oh, it really is. One of the places in the book is Miniatur Wunderland in Germany. It’s the biggest model train set-up in the whole world. I wonder if Ms Simone has ever seen it?
MIMSY: And maybe she brought pfannkuchen for the passengers! Choo-choo!
MS MCLAUGHLIN: Ha! That would be something! Also, remember Ms Rita? She will be excited to know that there are two places in Peru that are mentioned in the book. First, the Keshwa Chaca Rope Bridge. Imagine walking across a wobbly bridge high above a deep canyon… and the whole thing is made out of grass! Every year, families weave it together strand by strand to keep it strong.
And second, the Nazca Lines, which are HUGE pictures of animals and shapes carved into the desert floor about 1500 years ago! They’re so big you can only see it from high in the sky.
SERGIO: A bridge of grass and giant desert drawings? That sounds like magic.
MS MCLAUGHLIN: Funny enough, the Nazca Lines are very similar to one of the things you’ll be asking Dylan about this morning.
SERGIO: Whoa, Explorer! I can’t wait to hear about that mystery. It really is a fascinating book. And if you’d like to see it yourself, you can find a link to the book in our episode description.
[DING DONG]
MIMSY: Ooooh! That must be him.
SERGIO: Yup, I think that’s Dylan. Let’s go ahead and bring him in. Now just remember, when we ask someone questions, it’s just as important to be good listeners. So let’s open our ears big and wide and get ready to learn all about Australia…through two fascinating stories that appear in his book.
[MUSIC STING]
SERGIO: Dylan, thank you so much for talking with me today. I was looking through your Explorer’s Guide for Kids, and WOW…it feels like every page uncovers another adventure. It’s the perfect starter kit for any kid who wants to be a full-time explorer. What made you want to share these adventures with kids?
DYLAN: The purpose of that book was really to take a kid on a journey around the world and show them all of the different amazing unusual surprising kinds of places. Places that like you know maybe they'd never heard of but as soon as you learn about them you're like how did I not know about this.
SERGIO: Ooooh, let’s dive in then! Why do you think going somewhere new — and stepping into a different place or culture — gives so many people that little tickle of excitement inside?
DYLAN: What happens when you travel is, it's so unfamiliar. There's all this stuff that you don't know, there’s like customs you’re not sure how to navigate, and your brain just like turns all the way back on. Suddenly you have to really kind of tune in to many things that you might otherwise ignore. Even the trash cans are a different shape or a different color or whatever. It lights your brain up, you know, it's a very distinct kind of experience.
SERGIO: I love that! Do you remember the very first time you got excited about exploring the world?
DYLAN: All the travel I did as a kid and even as a teenager with my parents was road trips, and and one of these trips that was really just through the Midwest we stopped at a place in Wisconsin called House on the Rock and it is unlike any other place in the world as far as I'm concerned I think there is like no, there is nothing else quite like it.
SERGIO: [wonderment] Why? What’s inside?
DYLAN: The world's largest indoor carousel with the most diverse Carousel animals. They built a sculpture of a squid fighting a whale the size of the Statue of Liberty. They were just like kind of making stuff up and just creating spectacle. Anyway, it’s awesome.
SERGIO: I’d love to visit there one day. (beat) Alright, Dylan, let’s talk about Australia. You wrote in your book about something waaay out in the outback called the Marree Man. What can you tell us about it?
DYLAN: The Marree Man is one of the great mysteries of all time. So The Marree Man is sometimes referred to as the largest piece of art in the world or the largest piece of graffiti in the world. It is an enormous drawing of a human figure, an Aboriginal figure, throwing a kind of weapon, a kind of throwing stick, out in the desert.
SERGIO: Now, when you say big, you mean BIG. According to your book, Dylan, The Marree Man stretches over 2 and a half miles long! Oh boy! I can’t even imagine what that would look like!
DYLAN: So if you were standing next to it in the outback, you might not even realize you were next to it actually it might just look like a kind of patch of ground, of dirt that like looks a little different.
But the thing is the Marree Man despite being this what's called something called a geoglyph, this enormous drawing, it is not an ancient piece of art. It is relatively new. It appeared in the outback sometime in the 1990s and we know this because bush pilots flying over this region of the Outback, somebody looked down and said wait a second what is this enormous, enormous drawing and where did it come from?
The truth is is we don’t have an answer to this question. This has been an ongoing mystery for almost 30 years and There's a lot of theories about who might have actually carved The Marree Man. You would have probably needed GPS or some kind of way to know what you were doing because it is so big, it's kind of inconceivable the scale. You just couldn't even know where you were drawing without either a GPS or planes or so it's like actually like a relatively high-tech intensive activity. Someone made like the largest piece of art in the world and we don't know who it is I really like that.
SERGIO: Whoa! A mystery with no answer! (beat) Well, another fascinating thing about Australia is the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect. Whew that name is super long—but what makes it so special?
DYLAN: The Lord Howe Island stick insect was recorded as extinct sometime in the 1930s because no one had seen one for a long time and just so you can imagine, they're called stick insects but they have another nickname. They are also called “tree lobsters” because they do look a little bit like a lobster. They are enormous. They're these big chunky footlong stick insects that just kind of amble around doing their thing, you know, eating leaves but it was thought that basically rats introduced to Lord Howe Island had eaten them all and they were gone.
SERGIO: That’s so sad … but wait, there’s more to the story, right Dylan? As your book says, something magical happened in 2001. Can you explain what that was?
DYLAN: There are these reports that start coming back from this place called Ball's Pyramid and it's this giant, it's like the remnants of an enormous volcano. This huge spire of rock, you know, taller than the Eiffel Tower, like coming out of the ocean. And people would go there and they would climb, mountain climb for fun. And reports started coming back even in the 1960s like I think something's living here like there's evidence like under these few little eucalyptus leaves like we're seeing these little poops like and we don't know what they are.
And then in the 2000s these two entomologists decided —
SERGIO: Hey! Entomologist! Remember, that is someone who studies insects.
MIMSY: Just like Hikaru!
SERGIO: Exactly. Sorry, Dylan. Keep going! This is great stuff!
DYLAN: These two entomologists decided all right we have a theory and we want to investigate. But they get here and they climb up about 300 meters up the side of this thing and they find living under essentially one bush, one little clump of bushes, the last 24 Lord Howe Island stick insects.
Somehow they had made their way to this little tiny spire of rock, we don't know how they got there it's possible that they floated on, they can't swim, so it's possible they floated on a log or even were brought there as prey but then like dropped and not eaten like it's just not totally obvious how they got there but they got there and they formed this little colony and they were like truly the rarest insect in the world at this point. There's 24 of them in total. So the scientists were like whoa this species is not extinct it is alive it is only alive here, and they made this big plan and what they ended up doing is basically taking a breeding pair off the island back to I believe was the Melbourne zoo trying to get them to mate. The first pair died. They tried again. They took a second pair and that pair successfully, they called them Adam and Eve, and that successfully gave birth to many many more and so they're basically repopulating this species and there's actually a whole plan to reintroduce them to Lord Howe Island because that's where they originally from.
SERGIO: Wait! What about the rats!? Did they all disappear from Lord Howe Island?
DYLAN: No. So this is part of the problem actually. To do this, they would have to go and eradicate the rats. The problem with the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect is like it's a slow-moving, large juicy meal and it makes for a very attractive prey for anything like a rat, so there is some, this is a complication they have to figure out.
SERGIO: Wow. That’s incredible, Dylan. Out of all the amazing places and stories in Australia, why did these two stand out to you?
DYLAN: I just felt like both the Marree Man, this great mystery in the outback, this giant piece of art, and this species that was thought to be extinct and then you know found again on this incredible, you know, Rock Spire I just, I loved both of those stories for their mystery their surprise and I, you know, my hope is that kids look at this book and and realize the world's like a really big place with a lot of strange and surprising things in it and you could grow up to be that scientists or you could grow up to either solve who's carved the Maree Man or create the Maree Man depending on on what kind of kid you are so it's like I don't know I think there's like something really nice about being shown the sheer breadth and surprise of the world.
SERGIO: Okay. Last question, Explorer to Explorer: what advice would you give to kids who want to learn more about the world, just like you?
DYLAN: Go visit your library first off like your library is your friend. Every library and Librarian Is bursting at the seams to give you a pile of awesome books and you can just go in and say whatever you're into. You can be like yeah I'm really into like sword fighting or I'm really into, I want to know how to take care of horses. You are gonna leave that library with an awesome pile of books like Librarians are like ,they live they live to give you that book that sparks your imagination so that's that's an easy one. I also think like taking tiny adventures. Maybe it's in your backyard maybe it's with your parents but you know, the world is mysterious. The water in the creek behind your house is full of mystery and magic and strange little creatures. The wonder of the world is not found necessarily by traveling far and wide, it is found by looking deeply and so you can do that really anywhere!
SERGIO: I have a feeling Ms McLaughlin is going to LOVE that answer. Dylan, thank you for allowing us to learn all about Australia through some of its magical places.
[MUSIC SWELLS]
SERGIO: What a ride that was! Today we uncovered a giant mystery drawing in the desert and met some bugs that came back from the edge of extinction. Pretty wild, huh?
Now before we go, I just got another voicemail. This one is from my friend Ms Nkiru. She’s from Nigeria. Let’s have a listen.
[CLICK]
JENNIFER: Ndewo, Sergio and Mimsy. This is Nkiru. I know how much you love cooking dishes from all around the world, so I just wanted to call and invite you into my home to make a traditional Nigerian dish; yam and eggs. It’s really yummy and a lot of fun to make. I can also teach you all about Nigerian culture. Let me know if you’re interested.
SERGIO: Yam and eggs! That sounds super delicious. What do you think, MImsy? Should we take up Ms Nkiru on her offer?
MIMSY: Oh yes…I’m already hungry!
SERGIO: Yummmm me too!. I can’t wait to learn all about another incredible global dish (and the culture that comes with it). Until then, have a wonderful week and remember…keep exploring.