Legend tells that the Kingdom of Cambodia was born of the union between an Indian Brahman prince and a Khmer princess, the daughter of the powerful King Nâga, a Hindu deity with several heads and the body of a cobra.

When the Indian prince Kaundinya reached Cambodia, Princess Somâ defended herself with such strength and spirit that the Prince was forced to use his magic bow in order to submit her. Dazzled by her beauty, however, he asked King Nâga for his daughter's hand in marriage. The King agreed, drank all the water that covered the land of Cambodia, and offered the rich land as a dowry. And so the union of the sun and the moon was celebrated.

As a consequence of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, the country was crossed off the tourist maps for several decades. Planète Insolite proposes to rediscover le "pays du sourire" , its perfectly preserved tropical environment, unrivalled cultural heritage, as well as the warmth and graciousness of its people.

You will discover Phnom-Penh, the Kingdom's capital.

Phnom-Penh is situated on the site of the river's "four arms", i.e. the Mekong River from the northeast, the Tonle Sap River from the northwest, the Bassak or Tonle Bassak River from the southwest, and the Mekong River, continuing south to the sea.

Tonle Sap is in fact the junction of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, a great lake south of Siemp Reap, where the temple of Angkor takes us back to the origins of the Khmer civilization.

You will also discover a more authentic side of the country when you travel across the rice fields of Takeo, Kampot's famous pepper plantations and Kep, the never-ending beaches and little-known coral islands on the Cambodian coast of the Gulf of Siam ...

Any trip to Cambodia has to include a visit to the magical site of the temples of Angkor. According to legend, the site was built by Preh Ket Mealea (the son of Indra and the Queen of Cambodia) with the help of his friend Preah Pisnokar, himself the son of a goddess and a poor Chinaman.

"Indra was forced to turn his son away from the heavens , because he was mortal and therefore could not live among the gods. But the God of gods asked Preh Ket Mealea to build a reproduction of one of the Celestial Temples with the help of his friend Preah Pisnokar, a gifted draughtsman. Humbly, Preh Ket Mealea decided on his father's cowshed, and the site of Angkor was born. On the day of his son's Coronation as Jayavarman II, Indra came back to earth to enthrone him and give him the Sacred Sword to found the kingdom of Kambuja. It was also at that time that the Apsaras, celestial dancers, revealed the secrets of their sacred choreograhy to the Khmer."