Snapshots from the jungle, part 4: Unusual foods

This final installation in the series of jungle-related blog posts will center on that central aspect of any travel adventure: new and delicious foods. I'll start with the foods I did not eat, but only witnessed the weirdness of...

Armadillo meat on sale at Belén market

Turtle meat, also on sale all over Belén

Mmmm, maggots - these live ones were crawling around in a bowl waiting to be skewered into grilled kebabs

One of my braver companions sampling the maggots

Now, onto foods I actually ate.

Bananas were everywhere - mini-bananas, bananas that taste like apples, orange bananas, green-peeled bananas, non-sweet bananas that are served as a substitute for potatoes, fried bananas, banana chips, the list goes on. All of them were delicious, as was pretty much every other jungle fruit we sampled. My favorite was zapote, a small, round green fruit with a hard outer rind, whose orange inner fruit was a blend of the taste and texture of a cantaloupe, a mango, and a pumpkin.

In addition to bananas, coconuts were to be found on every corner. Street carts and roadside shacks were always ready to machete-chop a green, yellow, or brown variety open for you to stick a straw in and have some refreshing coconut water.

Sugar-cane juice is the other popular Iquitos choice of drink. When visiting a village outside the city, we got to experience the traditional way of making the juice, and it was amazing how much liquid can be crushed out of a single stalk of cane. Unsurprisingly, considering that it's basically an earthy-tasting sugar water, the juice was delicious.

When we spent a morning fishing for piranhas, Kelsey caught a catfish big enough for us to share during lunch, which was also quite tasty.

The baby catfish I caught was obviously too small for lunch - we used him as piranha bait instead

Although not caught by our own efforts, I did later get the chance to eat some grilled piranha, served whole with teeth and all. It was accompanied by the traditional jungle tacacho: smashed bananas that have been rolled into a ball and lightly fried.

The final installation in the Iquitos food saga is by no means a jungle specialty, but it was literally the best omelette I have eaten in my life, so it merits a spot on the blog all the same. On the last day of our trip, we decided to have brunch at a French bistro (à la Georgetown's Café Bonaparte) we'd seen along the water. The result was this beautiful mushroom-cheese omelette with a real-deal French baguette on the side. We of course spent the plane ride home kicking ourselves for not having discovered this miracle restaurant earlier in the week - oh well, guess I'll just have to go back! :)