Feast: Peruvian Amazon
The Belén district in the Peruvian Amazon is located in Iquitos, the most populous city in the world that cannot be reached by road. Typically, it’s reached by boat, and on my first visit, I took a surreal four-day boat ride to get here; the only food was served by transvestite cooks who dished out rice and bits of bony fish cooked in dirty river water. Iquitos is divided into two parts: the low and the high. The lower section is made up of several thousand houses that stand on a balsa wood foundation, so that when the water from the Itaya River is high, the village will float. The rest of the year, the houses in the neighborhood sit directly on the dirt. Apart from a smattering of houses, the upper section is composed almost entirely of the Belén market, the largest in Iquitos.
Hungry, I enter the market area and am hit with heady smells that combine and alter as the air wafts to and fro among the stalls. For a moment, I get the sweet smell of passionfruit and oranges, then, as the breeze shifts, I get the pungent scent of animal flesh decaying in the sun, replacing the ephemeral bliss with putrescence. The sights of butchered armadillo meat and small, odiferous, filthy cages occupied by Dusky Titi monkeys and keel-billed toucans adds to the nausea. I watch a woman snap a chicken’s neck and the intestines being pulled out of a pig.
And the noise. Shouts come from everyone trying to sell whatever they have: jungle tobacco rolled up in pieces of newspaper for cigarettes; turtle eggs; and the ubiquitous pink Hannah Montana backpacks you can buy anywhere in the world.
Not finding my meal here, I decide on a canoe ride through the lower section of Iquitos with two teenagers, Ryder and Carlos, to find lunch. The pair approached me in the market, and I hired them to take me down. They take me to the outskirts of the village. A few meters from where we stop, there is a house, with a mass of brown fur lying on the deck.
“Qué están comiendo?” Ryder asks. “Ahh, una perezosa.” It’s a three-toed sloth and dead as a doornail. Locals are getting a fire ready and preparing to skin the animal.
“You want to try?” Carlos asks.
I feel sick to my stomach just thinking about it. I’ll eat almost anything, but this is pushing my limits. “Sorry. Maybe something a little less endangered.”
Gastronomic crisis averted, we return to the market area and come to a rubber bucket filled with squirming off-white grubs with black heads the size of a toe.
“What the hell are those?” I ask.
“Suri,” Ryder says.
“Suri?”
“Suri.”
Ryder explains that suri live in trunks of the Aguaje tree, where they eat the fruit of the same name. If you find the right tree, you can scoop them out by the handful. Sometimes they are skewered and grilled, but this method apparently dries out the insides, causing them to lose their “unique” flavor. The suri we will eat are in a metal pot, boiling in water and their own natural juices. We buy three for 1 sol, or about 30 cents.
Ryder and Carlos eat theirs without a second thought. I take a deep breath and bite in. There is a little hole in the back end of the suri, the butthole, and with my first bite, something with the consistency and flavor of warm melted butter explodes into my mouth. But I know it’s not butter. I have to chew through to rip the body in half, and I can feel my gag reflexes wanting to kick in. If I don’t eat the rest right away, I never will, so I pop the front end in my mouth. All the juices are already down, making their way through my system. The rest is rather rubbery, until the head, which is sort of crunchy, shatters into tiny fragments that taste a little like sand and stick to the back of my throat.
The buttery taste lingers for several hours afterward, and water is clearly not enough to get rid of it. I need something else to recover my palate. Camu camu, a reddish cherry-sized acidic fruit native to the Amazonian lowlands that has enough vitamin C in it to kill an agouti, is being served in ice cream just off the Plaza de Armas. Two scoops on a cone. Just a sol and a half.
I will probably never eat a suri again. The taste is not something I can handle. To be honest, I didn’t think it would be. But missing this chance to sample the grub would have been a mistake. There are so many diverse flavors that exist in the world, yet in most conventional supermarkets the choices are limited to a small fraction of them, often based on mass sales and low cost. The local markets that are universal in Peru offer the chance for more eclectic fare, one that any traveler should take advantage of just for the experience. For better or for worse.
