Ruining the dream? The challenge of tourism at Angkor, Cambodia

![CDATA[This chapter examines tourism as a series of intersecting representations, narratives and embodied practices in order to reveal significant disparities between the approach adopted for managing and presenting one of Angkor's most prominent landscapes and the values ascribed to the site by tourists visiting today. It is suggested that the idea of the ruin, as a deep-seated landscape construction, has been embraced by a tourism industry promoting Angkor as a destination. This has led to a touristic encounter with sites such as Preah Khan overwhelmingly oriented around romanticized notions of lost antiquities, exploration and wilderness. Crucially, these framings have come to over-ride the narratives of history and culture which the site's administrators and guardians are attempting to convey to their international audience.]]