Tag: Sustainable Tourism

A wide elevated view of dense rainforest canopy across the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia

Conservation

Singapore Never Said Where the Next Fifty Years of Sand Would Come From. Cambodia’s Rivers Have an Answer.

A banned trade, a protected river, and the ambitious reclamation plan quietly depending on both. The Trapeang Rung River isn’t somewhere most people have heard of. It flows through Koh Kong province in southwest Cambodia, past mangroves and lowland forest, home to one of the world’s least understood otter species, the endangered hairy-nosed otter, before

September 5, 2026

A boatman steering a small wooden boat with an outboard motor across calm lake water toward a forested island

Newsletter

Unmasked Weekly – Issue No. 24 | 3 September 2026

A Few Words From Me… Money keeps surfacing as the theme this week, or rather the question of where it actually ends up once it’s left your hand. Marriott Bonvoy’s new partnership with the orangutan foundation in Perak is about as clean an example as you’ll find: scan a QR code at check-in in Malaysia

September 3, 2026

two ancient statues draped in bright orange robes dominate the entrance inside Angkor Wat temple

Opinion

Siem Reap Needs Tourists Now. Is It Fair to Ask the City to Wait for the Right Ones?

Cambodia’s discount campaign has split the tourism industry down the middle, and the divide says something uncomfortable about who gets to hold out for quality Cambodia’s Ministry of Tourism launched the 2026 Siem Reap Tourism Service Mega Sale on the first of August, offering discounts of 10 to 50 percent at more than fifty hotels,

August 15, 2026

Newsletter

Unmasked Weekly – Issue No. 21 | 13 August 2026

A Few Words From Me Lampang doesn’t get that much attention – even from people like myself who’ve spent years in Thailand. This week its lac-dyed textiles earned official protected status, the same kind Champagne has, which feels overdue in the best way, a craft that could easily have been left to fade (no pun

August 13, 2026

Traditional tuk-tuk Bangkok old city street Thailand

Newsletter

Unmasked Weekly – Issue No. 20 | 6 August 2026

A Few Words From Me Three governments seem to have landed on the same idea this week: that how people move through a place matters as much as where they go. Thailand has started training its first proper hiking guides, launched at Khao Yai, one of the national parks that together see more than ten

August 6, 2026

Destinations

Siem Reap Has Never Been This Quiet. That’s Exactly Why You Should Go.

Angkor’s visitor numbers have fallen by a third, for reasons that have nothing to do with the temple itself. Turning up still matters. I have stood in front of Angkor Wat at sunrise exactly once, shoulder to shoulder with several hundred other people, all of us holding phones over each other’s heads trying to catch

August 1, 2026

Can Gio mangrove biosphere reserve boardwalk Vietnam

Eco-tourism

The Mangroves Nobody Photographs

Southeast Asia spent fifty years destroying its most useful coastline. It’s finally growing back, and Vietnam has the receipts. Nobody puts a mangrove forest on a postcard. Ask someone to picture Southeast Asia and you get white sand, a longtail boat, maybe a temple roof catching the light. Nobody pictures a tangle of grey roots

July 25, 2026

2 stone karsts rise above the sea as waves break on the rocky shore, typicla of the coastal landscape within Nino Konis Santana National Park, Timor-Leste

Eco-tourism

Vietnam, the Philippines and Timor-Leste Just Showed What Conservation Looks Like When Locals Have a Stake in It

Three new UNESCO biosphere reserves landed in June, including a first for Timor-Leste. What the designation is actually betting on, and what it asks of anyone who visits. Three places joined a very short list this June: UNESCO biosphere reserves, one of them a first for its country entirely. A biosphere reserve isn’t just a

July 18, 2026

Farm and river landscape in Vietnam's Mekong Delta region.

Newsletter

Unmasked Weekly – Issue No. 17 | 16 July 2026

Around the Region There’s a particular kind of travel news that never quite makes it past the trade press, and this week’s edition is a good example of that. UNESCO quietly added three new biosphere reserves to the map last month, one of them is a first for a country most readers have never had

July 16, 2026

photo shows a collection of Chiang Mai temples at sunset

Eco-tourism

Thailand Built a Sustainable Tourism Model in Krabi. Now It’s Rolling It Out in Chiang Mai.

Thailand tested its sustainable tourism model in Krabi. Now the same blueprint is heading north, and it changes how you should plan a Chiang Mai trip. Five years ago, Krabi became the testing ground for an idea Thailand’s tourism authority wasn’t sure would work: that a destination could be rebuilt around certified low-impact routes, trained

July 11, 2026