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! :)

Snapshots from the jungle, part 3: Animal friends

Going to the jungle means you get to see and interact with cool jungle animals, as evidenced by the following photos. As our group was particularly enamored of the monkeys, let's start with those:

They're not shy about clambering all over you, particularly if you're offering fruit treats

Nick even got a friend to ride around on his head during our canoe trip

Super-friendly bald uakari monkeys

The one named Lisa (la mona Lisa, get it?) especially loved to play

Baby wooly monkey

Saki monkey - so fluffy

Spider monkey

Ocelot: relatively small-sized but very large-eyed cat

We also saw a jaguar, but the photo about its food is better than the photo of the actual cat

Capybara: super-sized relative of a guinea pig

Coati - reminded me of the tricksy ones that try to steal your lunch at Iguazú

Giant anteater!

Lots of beautiful butterflies - the reserve we visited had 17 varieties

Macaw parrot

Adorable baby manatees at a wildlife preservation NGO - their bristly whiskers tickled when we fed them plant leaves 

This tree was full of hanging birds' nests

So many termites - the indigenous people use them as natural bug repellent

We saw lots of turtles hanging around, including this prehistoric-looking giant

Toucan! When they're not flying, they take giant two-foot hops instead of walking

Sloth! Who has a much better name in Spanish: oso perezoso (lazy bear)

Nocturnal frogs we found on our night expedition

Piranha, fresh-caught from the Amazon

Don't worry, Amanda survived the anaconda attack :)

Snapshots from the jungle, part 2: Life in the selva

When we stepped off the river boat, we had arrived in Iquitos, the heart of the Peruvian jungle. The city is surrounded by various rivers on all sides, so the heart of city (and tourist) life is the tree-lined waterfront promenade. Every night the walkway would fill with folks out for a stroll, the bars would fill with people-watchers, and the local capoeira (Brazilian dance/karate) club would come out to practice on the pier. The promenade also hosts a number of colonial-era tiled casonas, the mansion-like houses that were once home to the traders who made it rich off Iquitos' early rubber business.

But not everyone can live in a casona... thousands of Iquitos' inhabitants reside in Belén, a shantytown that is literally floating for ten months out of the year.

These houses are at the mercy of the Amazon's water levels. In June and July, the above waterway would be a normal city street, complete with pedestrians and buses, but the river reigns the rest of the year. Puttering in between the maze of houses in our motorized canoe, I kept pondering the endless list of potential complications of living in a house surrounded by (or, not uncommonly, inundated with) water. Although some of the houses are truly floating, the majority merely stand on very tall stilts. Last year the Amazon set records for flood levels, and the watermarks on the Belén houses made plain that many would've had 3+ feet of water in them. But that's life, and the residents simply live with land-housed relatives for a few months, or hike up their hammocks a couple extra feet until the water recedes.

The most common form of transport in Belén, and in Iquitos in general, are long wooden canoes with an outboard motor nailed onto the stern. Sometimes the boat driver has to pause the journey momentarily in order to re-nail the motor into place - normal. It is also totally normal for these passenger boats to pass under "bridges" (glorified wooden planks haphazardly nailed as footpaths across smaller canals) so low that all boat riders have to lay flat in the bottom of the boat to avoid decapitation. My sun-umbrella-holding friend in the photo below kindly showed me how it was done in enough time to avoid that sad fate - no thanks to the boat captain, who simply barreled forward at full speed.

When on land, Iquitos-ians use only open-air transportation: the breeze is the only saving grace in the otherwise constantly humid jungle heat. Consequently, none of the mototaxis have doors, and the buses are like trolleys: no windows or doors!

The other way to stay cool in the selva? Swimming of course! While the water is decidedly brown, a few parasites might even be worth it for a respite from the ubiquitous sweatiness. When we came across these niños having a ball in the river on our way back from the butterfly reserve, Kelsey couldn't resist joining in:

Our group spent a different day relaxing at a bathwater-warm jungle laguna, and another afternoon we cooled off at a tropical resort-esque swimming pool near the city. The pool was hidden in the midst of a lush green garden, complete with a five-story treehouse that seriously belonged in "Swiss Family Robinson." We contemplated giving up our hostel beds and permanently relocating to this arboreal dream-home, but the owners informed us that sleeping in the treehouse was 100% prohibido.

Crushed, we settled for a one-night sojourn to a jungle lodge a two-hour boatride from Iquitos. The coolest part about those accommodations was when it poured rain at night, and we got to fall asleep to the beautiful sound of water falling on the thatch-leaf roof. Surprisingly, no leaks!

Part of our jungle lodge tour was a visit to a community of indigenous Yaguas people. Once you get over the extreme cheesiness/awkwardness of the whole tourist-visiting-"natives" concept, there's still some interesting cultural knowledge to be gained from the experience. For example, upon arrival at the village we were offered a traditional drink. I was semi-listening to the guide's explanation while I took in my surroundings, and of course happily tried what I understood to be a liquid made from yuca. It was strangely sour and unlike anything I'd had before, but hey, try everything once right? Clearly I should've paid closer attention, since Amanda later informed me that was the famous traditional Peruvian drink made by old ladies who sit around and chew the yuca, re-spit it out into a bowl, and let it ferment until it's somehow acceptable to drink. Awesome. But, we did get to shoot extremely cool blow-dart guns, so I guess I came out even.

Face paint to welcome us into the tribe

Professional dart-gun warrior, obvio

And, one final random snapshot of jungle life: the makings of some woven reed baskets, laying in the sun to dry.

Snapshots from the jungle, part 1: River boat

The first phase of my Amazonian adventure was a three-day river boat ride from Yurimaguas to Iquitos, the largest city in the world that's not accessible by road. (We won't count the 34 hours of travel on four different buses that it took me to get from Cajabamba to Yurimaguas.) Our watercraft was the Bruno VI, a three-decker cargo boat the size of a small ferry.

Deck one was for cargo, but deck two was filled with passengers. The Bruno operates on a BYOH (bring your own hammock) basis, and then everybody strings up their home-away-from-home in every spare sliver of space. Jess, Nick, Chris and I initially put our hammocks up in the small covered patch of the open-air third deck, but when a very windy and rainy thunderstorm woke us up at 4:30am the first night, that was the end of that. Slightly soaked, we moved down into the thick of things for the rest of the trip.

The view from my hammock at any given moment pretty much looked like this: wide brown water, pure green jungle, and cloud-spotted skies.

But every so often we'd pull into a tiny town to load and unload cargo for about twenty minutes, or we'd see other (smaller) boats pass alongside.

One of the bigger towns - all the houses made of wood with leaf roofs

Banana boat!

Our boat days were at the mercy of the ship's early-bird meal schedule: 6:30 breakfast, 11:30 lunch, 4:30 dinner. The Bruno also operates on a BYOT (bring your own tupper) basis, so all my meals were eaten out of this same orange bowl:

Aside from mealtimes, we spent our days swinging in our hammocks, reading lots of books, playing an ongoing rotation of casino-euchre-hearts card games, hanging out with our best three-year old friend Zoe, and just watching the river roll by. It was a relaxing couple of days, and definitely an interesting experience to see how jungle travel works in Peru.

Zoe's hammock was right next to ours, and she found us fascinating: our water bottles, our books, our card games, she just wanted to be part of it all

Amazon sunset

The other pig: on the rise in the USA

Interesting fact of the day: according to this NPR article entitled "From Pets to Plates: Why More People Are Eating Guinea Pigs," cuy consumption is slowly creeping into American gastronomy, via authentic Peruvian restaurants.

I'm back!

After almost two weeks in the jungle, I arrived back at site today and immediately dumped the entire contents of my backpack into the laundry - the selva is a seriously sweaty place. After a quick, but necessary, post-overnight-bus shower, I then set out into town to inform the youth of Cajabamba that yes, I still work here, and that they all need to attend the youth entrepreneurship classes I'm starting next week. An afternoon later, it's eight jóvenes down, the rest of the town to go. But I did pick up some fresh-from-America girl scout cookies from the post office, so I consider it a day well spent.

Once I hang up my armfuls of jungle laundry, deal with the eight million emails that have accumulated in my inbox after two weeks off the grid, attempt to find budding entrepreneurs via every means possible (radio, TV, posters, flyers, school announcements), prep materials for the somewhere-between-two-and-four community banks that I hope to start in the next week, and eat a few more tagalongs, I promise I will update the blog with jungle stories and photos. Because the Amazon is awesome!