Don’t believe dreams come true? It happened to me and it can happen to you!I found love through the Shwedagon Pagoda in Myanmar (Burma). One event connected to another and changed my entire life.
I spent an inky black night after sunset at Schwedagon Pagoda with a musician named George back in 2000. I have never forgotten the feelings of harmony and belonging I had that night looking at the golden spires. I always knew I would be back but I never imagined it would be with another musician named George who would also be my husband!
Prior to showing up at the stupa, I had made a series of choices that led me to be an Ivy League Graduate working as a shuffleboard helper on a cruise around Asia for fifty days and fifty nights.
Dropping out of a top five medical school allowed me the time to learn to SCUBA dive. Desiring to dive but earning the pittance of a schoolteacher’s salary encouraged me to leap into a position at Club Med as a GO and trapeze artist. My next hop onto a series of cruise ships meant I sailed on the Yellow Sea into Yangon in 2000. After seven years of pulling into different ports, the most remarkable sunset was at Schwedagon Pagoda. I will never forget that night.
Lisa Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries on six continents. This University of Pennsylvania graduate sailed across the seas for seven years with Princess Cruises, Royal Caribbean, and Renaissance Cruises and spent three years backpacking across Asia. Discover her articles in publications from AARP: The Magazine and AAA Explorer to WIRED and Wharton Magazine, as well as her site WeSaidGoTravel.
On her award nominated global podcast, Make Your Own Map, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors, and as a journalist has been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. 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-two times.
Named a #3 travel influencer for 2023, Niver talks travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, her YouTube channel with over 2 million views, and in her memoir, Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty.
Thank you to Deb and Dave of The PlanetD for sharing my story from Myanmar: “Finding Love Through the Shwedagon Pagoda.”
