A feel-good story of an expat who found his way through the jungle that is Cambodia:

January 14, 2021
How to beat the booze by hunting temples
Peter Olszewski / Khmer Times

English-expat Paulo Bonini at Trav Temple making one of his videos for YouTube. Supplied

Having spent the last fourteen years living in Siem Reap and steadily drinking, retired 52-year-old English-expat Paulo Bonini has turned to a new pursuit – temple hunting.

Or, as he puts it, he’s gone from being an alcoholic to being a temple-holic.

“The truth is I started all this as I am a recovering alcoholic, on a litre of vodka a day,” he says, “My anxiety and depression were crippling and I was truly lost, but it is without doubt having the draw of ancient wonders that got me out and on the road, and my life went from a complete lonely wreck to me being a very contented man.”

Now, instead of going to bars, he goes bush-bashing, hunting down little-known temples and ancient artifacts such as elephant statues hidden deep in the Cambodian wilds.

And instead of guzzling, he’s Googling to find more information about more hidden sacred edifices which are then filmed on video for broadcast via YouTube.

To do this, he’s armed himself with a growly imported Honda CB 500 motorbike, tricked out with a host of modifications. And he’s also buddied up with another Siem Reap temple-holic, American expat and photographer Scott Sharick, who is holed up in town because his “five or six year” bicycle ride around the world has come to a temporary halt in Siem Reap.

Scott first visited Cambodia in 2014 and moved to Siem Reap in 2015. “Since I was not working while I lived in Siem Reap I had a lot of time on my hands,” he says. “At that time Angkor Archeological Park was full of tourists and I began to search for quieter, less visited temples. I had no idea that there are thousands of sites around Cambodia. Once I started finding some temples relatively close to Angkor, I wanted to find more.”
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Related to the topic 'HERE IS A LIST OF FORGOTTEN TEMPLES IN CAMBODIA'

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Nice to hear a story about someone who turned their life around like that