Happy New Year to you all! We hope that your holiday breaks haven’t been as star-crossed as ours. We got off to a rough start to the holiday with stomach illnesses, and then missed the Christmas Eve church service by changing our mind about which chapel to visit and showing up just as the crowd was letting out and the bells were chiming since the service was at a different time. Even worse, the next day we showed up for what we thought was the Christmas Day lunch we had been invited to at 11:30 am, only to find out that it had been the night before at 11:30 pm (how were we supposed to know that Christmas dinner is on Christmas eve?!). Fortunately, our hosts were very kind and invited us in for a delicious lunch of leftover turkey and stuffing, and we actually got to talk with them more than we probably would have at the real dinner. We’re hoping that we get to go back to trade English lessons for cooking lessons.
So with our remaining week and a half of the holiday break, we decided that we needed to take charge and engage more proactively with the city. One of our so-far unachieved goals was to see the Belen market, which is listed in the guidebooks as the main feature of Iquitos besides the jungle tours (we’d been stalling on this because we heard there is a good possibility of getting robbed). We called our friend Cesar, and he obliged by coming over with a friend early on Sunday morning to give us a tour. We tried not to make ourselves easy gringo targets- no wristwatches or cameras (except the FlipCam, so there are some videos), and everything else in interior zip pocks- although I was still warned that someone might take my UNC ball-cap (no!).
Belen is basically a huge section of the city along the floodplain of Iquitos’ eastern edge that is transformed into a market. We had made some brief forays into the edge of it for Christmas supplies, but never as deeply and never on a Sunday morning, apparently the busiest time. Thousands of people crowded the maze of tunnels created by all the tables and overhanging tarps. There are two separate parts- an upper area (on the same level as our apartment) where most of the tables and vendors are located, and a lower section in the floodplain below where people live and where some of the more illicit exchanges go on. This lower section is often flooded by water, so many of the houses are on stilts or on floating logs and the inhabitants get around in small boats. However, the river has apparently been unusually low, so we were able to walk around some on the concrete and mud pathways.
There were piles of foods, many of which we had seen before, but also many that were new to us. There were mounds of fruits and vegetables, some familiar (bananas, onions, potatoes, etc) and some not (coconas, copoazus, carambolas, camu camu and many other things that didn’t start with the letter C). There was one particularly cramped passageway with lots of bark shavings, vines, leaves, and other plant products, where the local shamans supposedly do a lot of their shopping. There was also an abundance of spices and sauces in tiny clear plastic bags. And whenever you bought something, even if it was already in a plastic bag, they made sure to give you another bag to put it in. Some tables had stacks and stacks of dried, salted fish while others had still living ones flopping around in baskets. Although we declined to go the section of the market where there were live animals for sale, we still saw plenty of turtles, giant snails, and poultry struggling to get free (not fun for Jess). Some of the less lively meat included rows and rows of chickens (with or without heads), hog heads and intestines (with or without flies), slabs of paiche (a threatened giant Amazon fish), and endangered turtle and caiman meat.
All this got us thinking about the amount of resources being harvested from the surrounding rainforest to supply consumers in Iquitos (and also to be shipped out to Lima and beyond). Jess wanted to purchase a turtle in order to set it free later (this is one reason we didn’t go to the main live-animal vending section), but we realized that paying someone for the turtle would just encourage them (and others) to go catch more. Even the plastic bags end up on the ground or in the river, or, in the best-case scenario, they’ll wind up in the unregulated landfill of the city that also leaks into the river. It’s not so much different from the big box grocery and electronic stores at home, just a little easier here to comprehend the route from collection to consumption and disposal. Plus, it isn’t obvious that the prices that they charge for the goods sold there really make the transfer of the stuff downriver to Iquitos worthwhile.
Throughout the market there were dogs and children running around in the mud and a distinctive, unpleasant smell that has stayed in our clothes after returning home. In the floodplain below, where there are a least several thousand houses on stilts, there is no running water and we have to assume that much of what is used comes from the well-polluted river. Most of the concrete below our feet was crumbling or covered in mud (and poop), and most of the food (and all of the meat) was sitting in the open air for all the passing humans and insects to touch (if you watch the youtube videos, you can see women flicking the flies off their meat). It makes you think about the things we take for granted in the United States- clean running water, food and safety regulations, sanitation, healthcare, and stray animal services- most of which haven’t actually been around very long and still seem to be continually under threat from someone. Life here still seems to exist in the small jungle village mentality, except on a much larger, denser scale which doesn’t logically seem like it can be supported for very long.
In the end, we decided to get just a few fruits to experiment with in our blender, a Christmas-present to ourselves. (Cesar and his friend were not incredibly knowledgeable about how to make refrescos, apparently it works the same way here where teenage boys rely on their moms to do most of the cooking). We chose fruits still safely packaged within skins and peels in the hopes that this might be enough to ward off unfriendly stomach bugs. So far we’ve only tried the cocona, which made a good refresco-juice, but we forgot we also need to find a colander to get out all the seeds. In spite of all our qualms with the market, it was a lively and authentic-feeling place and we are looking forward to diving in more in the future for spices and veggies and more crazy jungle fruits.
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