I suspect what was meant was that it's only apparent if you can view the torus from "a bird's eye view". If you were an ant walking on the surface at night, you

I suspect what was meant was that it's only apparent if you can view the torus from "a bird's eye view". If you were an ant walking on the surface at night, you would never run into a hole in the usual sense. You would be hard pressed to find a way to distinguish the surface from that of a sphere. As an ant you could easily see that you were not on the surface of an infinite plane simply because you keep coming back to the same spot over and over again. In order to figure out that there was a hole (or more appropriately named as 'handle'), you'd need to leave some thread behind and notice that there was no way to contract various loops to a point.