After a long day cycling, walking, climbing or whatevering through Angkor's temples, you should get yourself a little reward. All over Cambodia, you'll find Seeing Hands, a massage salon where blind people give you a wonderful massage. Seeing Hands has a branch in Siem Reap, too - on main street, close to the Canadia Bank building, but hidden in a backyard.
For a one-hour massage, you now pay 5$, if you want to be massaged in an airconditioned room even 6$. First you change into more convenient clothes (i.e. a pyjama-like thing). You then put all your belongings in a basket that you can keep below your massage couch. Then you'll meet your masseur or masseuse who will start kneading you from head to toe. If there's any part that he or she should treat carefully or extra strongly, just say so. Then enjoy!
After one hour and a most relaxing treatment, you change into your normal clothes again, hand over the money to your masseur or masseuse and wave a friendly goodbye... and all the aching muscles from your temple adventures are healed again!
The good thing apart from your massage: you help blind people who would otherwise hardly have a chance in Cambodia's economy to earn a living. And you can be perfectly sure that the treatment is not sexual - what in my opinion isn't guaranteed when you see all the young girls shouting "Massage!" at you in the bar area.
Equipment:
Bring an exhausted body...
Baloon rides are very popular in Angkor temple area. They offer excellant aerial view of the Angkor Wat temples, specially during sunrise and sunset. The charges are US$15 per ride and each ride lasts for 10 minutes. You can easily view the West Baray (lake on the west), the Tonle Sap lake and Phnom Bakheng. I guess the rates for children below 12 is less and if you are a local person, you can do it at less than half the price quoted for foreigners.
There are several places like this in SR whre you can get body massages from blind people. Comingo from Bangkok, the word "massage" was at first a bit suspicious to me: touristic place, massage, women sitting at the entrance...
BUT no, it wasn't that kind of massage, but a normal one, and I must say a very good one. The place is not very inviting, a simple naked room with a place to lay down. There you get a full body massage for more than an hour for 3 USD!!
With this massages, besides helping your own body, you help these blind people to earn their money, which in other way would be very difficult for them :-)))
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