ABSTRACT
The early development of the Angkor, Siem Reap region as a world heritage landscape took place against a backdrop of steadily increasing tourist arrivals. By the end of the 1990s however, newspapers, trade journals, and travel magazines frequently drew upon a vocabulary of ‘explosion’ or ‘boom’ to describe the extraordinary rise in tourismwhichwas nowoccurring. The following two chapters explore this fast-growing industry. Chapter 5 interprets tourism as a socio-cultural landscape of representations, narratives, and embodied encounters. In contrast, the pages that follow focus more on economic and political processes to illustrate how Angkorean tourism has been molded by governmental development strategies, policies of site management, and imbalances in infrastructure across the Southeast Asian region.
