Belen Market

Sunday morning we woke up vaguely early to go and see the market at Belen famed for it's bizarre produce. The kind of place where you can buy just about anything jungle related, even baby jaguars so we were told. Baby jaguars ended up being a myth, although we could have bought a tiny baby monkey or some very distressed and unhappy looking parrots so maybe jaguars arrive at the stalls sometimes too. It was the most mind-blowing experience of the trip, a sensuary overload, I couldn't believe my eyes and I wanted to lose my sense of smell. The heat and crampt, make-shift market stalls, filthy mud and debris on the ground, it was an assault on the senses and my sense of perception of reality. I couldn't believe what was I was seeing, what was going on around me, how was it possible for these people to buy and eat food from a place like this. Children and dogs, adults alike sleeping under or on top of some of the wooden table. The disregard or total lack of awareness for any sense of hygiene was terrifying. The weirdest thing I have ever seen or experienced, pushing the limits of what I thought was possible. Above all, it STANK! There were bald or seriously mangy looking stray dogs strolling around and weaving through the crowds of people, tracing through the dirt and sniffing at all the produce. The ground was a gooey mud mixture that almost certainly had traces or a high percentage of sewage. There were bits of debris everywhere, fish scales, fish guts, fruit skins, anything, everything and it wasn't just debris that ended up on the ground in the mud, there were also piles of fish which were being scaled or waiting to be washed and placed on a table top to be sold. Anything waiting to be put on the stall table once a bit of space got cleared found itself on the ground in the mud to start off with, it seems. It was stressful to see such dangerous food handling. I had to ask myself if it was better to start living on things from packets here if that was how food got handled. It was terrifying, a one way ticket to hospital and I really didn't want to see the inside of the hospital if the hygiene standards here were anything to go by. 

The smell of the market was a mixture of the smell of raw fish, raw meat, rotting older market produce, mud and sewage. I deeply regretted putting on slim soled open-toed sandals, fairly certain I was going to contract dysentery from some small or invisible cut on my one of my feet. In short, the smell was awful and it denoted a terrible truth, that the market itself was kind of rotting under its own tarpaulin canopy in the jungle humidity and heat.

The sprawling streets offered up a mixture of pretty much everything imaginable, or for a westerner like me, far outside the realms of imagination. It started off with a simple pedestrian introduction to some medicinal plants, roots, powders, bottled concoctions which I obviously wanted to buy in their thousands. Herbal medicine fascinates me, the properties of plants especially here with the wealth of flora. Witch doctor, shaman like stall holders had all sorts of things for all sorts of ailments as well as snake skins, parts of crocodiles and other jungle reptiles and birds, collections of skulls and teeth. Jaguar skins even - I thought they were rare, I was shocked to see that they were still being hunted. Perhaps everything in the jungle gets hunted. Towards the meat section of the market we passed by some stalls selling turtles heads, arms, legs, even the eggs from inside the stomach. Brutal, disgusting. I wasn't in the least bit interested in trying weird local food. I wondered what sort of bold adventurer would take the risk of trying some market made food. That was another thing, there were turtles and fish soups being cooked right next to their raw, butchered counterparts. It was, once again, quite a frightening thing to behold.

We got approached by a guy who offered to take us on a tour, I was instantly apprehensive but it was cheap and the guy seemed nice so we accepted. Fortunately it turned out to be a good decision. He took us through a section of the market that made me want to be sick dead animals everywhere. Brains, cows noses detached from the face still dripping with blood, hearts, intestines. It was graphic, it was revolting, it had me at the limit of what I could cope with, as we neared the end of the butchers tables they narrowed putting me in very real danger of actually brushing past and touching some internal or external bloody body part of a dead sheep or a cow. My friend could see how distressed I was and took me by the hand to guide me out of the final bit of the meat market. The bald dogs were sleeping right underneath some of the tables tops, thicker, deeper sewage mud on the ground, it was an experience I don't think I'll ever forget.

Belen market is not for the faint-hearted but for it packs a real punch in terms of the sheer rawness of experience.

The more agreeable section, fresh vegetables and fruit

Jaguar skin

Jungle herbs and medicines

Babies sleeping or being changed in the thick of it

The turtles

I failed to make it through the meat section of the market without fainting and taking photos. Guess you'll just have to get yourselves to Iquitos, Peru and see for yourselves...