By taxi, we arrived at “Buddha’s First Sacred Relic Pagoda, Botataung, Yangon”
This site was the original home of Buddah’s first sacred hair relic. The Buddha gave eight strands of his sacred hair to two brothers Tapussa and Bhalika who brought them to Okkla later called Dagon and now Yangon. (from site brochure)
On November 8, 1943, the RAF bombed Yangon’s wharves and the pagoda was badly damaged. From 1948-1953, a new pagoda was built with the original design with an internal cavity, which we visited. There were major renovations completed in 1990. According to the brochure, “Botataung Pagoda is the First Pagoda to be build in the world with the very first sacred hair relic of (Siddhartha Gotama) Buddha.
The pagoda is gilded with gold which is common in Myanmar. I liked walking inside the temple. Foreigners pay $3usd or 3000 kyat which is a bad exchange. For this reason, it was suggested to us to bring American dollars in small denominations to pay entrance fees. Most sites will give change so having ten or twenty dollar bills is fine you do not need so many ones.
We also saw the Nan Oo Royal Palace Bronze Image of Buddha which was taken by the British in 1886 with 300 other Buddha images while the British had annexed Burma. In 1948, the Myanmar government asked the British to return all the Royal possessions that had been taken from the Mandalay Palace after the Third Anglo Myanmar War. The image was returned on June 17, 1951 by the Staffordshire. The image is currently in a glass paneled shrine where it was installed on May 16, 1981. (from the site brochure and Yoma Press). September 29, 2012.
This movie is from our 28 days in Myanmar (Burma) from September 28, 2012 to October 26, 2012 and our year TRIP in South East Asia, see all the videos from our trip.
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Lisa Ellen Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries and six continents. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she worked on cruise ships for seven years and backpacked for three years in Asia. She is the founder of the website WeSaidGoTravel which is read in 235 countries and was named #3 on Rise Global’s top 1,000 Travel Blogs. Niver is a speaker at the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas Travel and Adventure Shows for 2023. Her podcast, “Make Your Own Map,” has been watched in more than 11 countries on 4 continents. Niver is represented by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary, Inc. Look for her memoir in Fall 2023 from Post Hill Press/Simon and Schuster.
You can find Lisa Niver talking travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, Satellite Media Tours, The Jet Set TV and Orbitz travel webisodes as well as her YouTube channel, where her WeSaidGoTravel videos have nearly 2 million views.
With more than 150,000 followers across social media, she has hosted Facebook Live for USA Today 10best, is verified on Twitter and listed on IMDb, and is the Social Media Manager for the Los Angeles Press Club.
As a journalist, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors and been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. She has been a judge for the Gracie Awards for the Alliance of Women in Media, and has run 15 travel competitions on her website, publishing over 2,500 writers and photographers from 75 countries.
For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty times.
Niver has published more than 2000 articles, in more than three dozen magazines and journals
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