With our bikes from New Park Hotel, we explored many temples including:
Gu-byauk-gyi (wet-kyin) with incredible paintings but you cannot take photos or video for preservation reasons.
Gu-byauk-nge: Due to its smaller size, you can see all three of the four seated Buddhas at once. It has lovely celling paintings.
Alo-pyi
Ywe-haung-gyi
Ananda
That-byin-nyu
Shwe-gu-gyi—in this temple we went up to a higher level and could see the old city and a literal sea of stupas. There are thousands of stupas of all shapes and sizes. The building occurred over two hundred years and was at the same time that the Khmer were building Angkor Wat in Siem Reap.
For lunch we stopped at Sarabha for cold water, chicken with cashew nuts and vegetable curry. The temple by Be nice to Animals restaurant is a yellow one with a mirror disco Buddha. I think it is either Min-o-chan-thar, or Tsu-taung-pyi.
At Ananda Paya there is restoration and reconstruction inside and out. We met part of the team from India. There are six restoration workers in Bagan for eight months working to restore the paintings. We were told it is a seven or eight year project with $11million dollars being spent by the Indian government. The four large standing Buddhas at Ananada are truly gigantic.
For sunset, we biked to near Buledi Temple. People used to climb Buledi but now that is not allowed any more. When George was in Bagan over ten years ago, you could climb nearly all the temples. Many are now closed to preserve the ancient wonders. The colors of the sunset highlighted the brick work on the surrounding temples. A stunning display of nature and buildings constructed for reverence.
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.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT! Our YouTube Channel is OVER 100,000 views and our new book is listed on Amazon as a HOT NEW RELEASE! We appreciate all of your interest for our journeys! Next contest starts September 11! See you at the Festival of the Pacific! Lisa and George
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
including National Geographic, Wired, Teen Vogue, HuffPost Personal, POPSUGAR, Ms. Magazine, Luxury Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Club, Saturday Evening Post, AARP, AAA Explorer Magazine, American Airways, Delta Sky, enRoute (Air Canada), Hemispheres, Jewish Journal, Myanmar Times, BuzzFeed, Robb Report, Scuba Diver Life, Ski Utah, Trivago, Undomesticated, USA Today, TODAY, Wharton Magazine, and Yahoo.
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National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards
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Southern California Journalism Awards
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2021 Finalist: Book Criticism
2020 Winner: Print Magazine Feature: Hemispheres Magazine, “Painter by the Numbers, Rembrandt”
2020 Finalist: Online Journalist of the Year, Activism Journalism, Educational Reporting, Broadcast Lifestyle Feature
2019 Finalist: Broadcast Television Lifestyle Segment for “Ogden Ski Getaway”
2018 Finalist: Science/Technology Reporting, Travel Reporting, Personality Profile
2017 Winner: Print Column “A Journey to Freedom over Three Passovers”
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