"Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings."
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
These sentiments echoed in my head as we cruised down the Rio Huallaga, but then the port of Iquitos crept into vision and there the similarities ended. Iquitos is a bustling, modern city of about 400,000 that strangely arose in the middle of the Peruvian jungle, at the headwaters of the mighty Amazon River. It is the largest city in the world still unreachable by road. The resulting juxtaposition of jungle and city, ancient and modern, and poverty and wealth is quite intense.
At midday, I was snapping photos of The Iron House, a colonial relic designed by Gustave Eiffel (designer of the armature for the Statue of Liberty, and more famously, the gaudy tower in Paris that bears his name) and imported piece by piece by some tycoon during the rubber boom in the late 1800s. One fifteen minute stroll later, and I was in the middle of Belén, one of the most impoverished communities I have ever visited. We spent hours perusing the famous marketplace and also explored the floating community via canoe. The village is forced to coexist with the seasonal rising of the Amazon river, so most houses are built on tall stilts or log rafts that rise and fall with the river. During the wet season, entire sections of the community are flooded and the first floor residences are abandoned.
The much over-hyped Iron House.
Catedral in the Plaza de Armas
Markets of Belén
Local chico showing off for us.
Water lilies large enough and strong enough to support a baby.
One of the best parts about the Belén market was the exotic food.
Alligator meat.
A plate laden with alligator meat, yucca, fried rice, and soup; and it only cost 5 soles (about $1.50)
Tortoise livers. Yummy.
Museum of Ethnic Tribes
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