Its shape is like changing the color of the sunset over the waters: the Tonle Sap basin is a huge lake that varies in size and shape depending on the time of the year. During the rainy season extends to cover much of western Cambodia, receiving the waters of the Mekong that his power is able to reverse the current trend of its effluent. The lake is life arise many towns and villages on its banks as a store of exploiting fisheries resources as well as irrigation.

For us the first port in a city that orbit around the Tonle Sap is Battambang, Cambodia's second city area and an obligatory stop on our way to Phnom Penh. Give up the visit to the temples on the hills nearby, preferring a longer stay in the bathroom of the guesthouse (Lariam damn!). Of new forces in the south continue to devote a day to explore the village life that arise between the western shore and the road. Pursat is another center rather developed and wonder where we draw the bustling market, the heart and live life in Asia. The waters of the lake are far away, withdrew, leaving on their way fertile land now covered by endless stretches of ocher-colored rice plants cut at the base during the harvest and left to dry until it is time to plant new ones. We get lost in the countryside, on roads carmine red as snakes that glide into the water. Here and there, check some country, then the road becomes a path and then dies swallowed by the mud dry and hard hours: we will not have a chance to see the mirror flat and calm, not today!
Retracing our steps to find the way be able to get out of this maze of paths and narrow streets is an enterprise worthy of the sixteenth-century explorers and the only signs in the sand drawn by a street vendor of flavored slush illegible, direct us correctly.
sit screaming expletives in 150 languages different to us and we promptly toss and turnat the the road , moving at 7 km/h in plain : only the constant smiles and encouragement of the wonderful cambodian people help us to return on a strip of asphalt that now ( buttoday)we try a bit 'more than sympathy. Tre sugar cane juice with ice drank one after another we remove the dust and the dryness of the mouth from the veins, allowing us to continue.
At last the lake and its life: Kampong Luong is a floating village inhabited mostly by people of ethnic Vietnamese moves with the seasons, back and forth to the rhythm of the Tonle Sap and its distance from the nearest land-based agglomeration varies from 7 to 12 km. A boat tour offers views of its channels extraordinary in their ordinariness: phone shops arise everywhere, boats full of vegetables have gone rowing with elderly women who sell door to door, banks, schools and gas stations on alternate simple homes . Everything is like in another country village, just that the buildings are floats and cars and carts are replaced by motor boats or rowing.
Further south, now take off from arms enveloping the lake but still in close contact with it, Kompong Chhnang is a great town slumbers on the banks of the Tonle Sap (the river) and where once again we can not help but appreciate the markets (both the central and the port) and the floating villages just upstream and downstream dell'imbarcadero.
From now on we are sucked into the traffic that until now had only guessed and Oudong, the former capital and home to several royal tombs, it flows to the side like a breath of wind . The strong smell of fish coming from the outlying farms takes us to the Muslim quarter of the capital, bustling downtown at the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap, the two main architects of the natural small nation.