Picked up at the hotel at 7:30 am by the moto-taxi we had hired the night before to take us to the outdoor market, we wove and bobbed through a chaotic scrum of vehicles like ours. (There are an estimated 30-50,000 moto-taxis in Iquitos, with conventional taxis limited to travel to/from the airport.) There are no lane markers on the streets, so anything and everything is possible. More than once, we thought that we were going to be sideswiped or wind up in a ditch.

The market, which is strung out along a ridge parallel to the Amazon, looks like most third-world open markets with fruits and vegetables of all kinds offered. What impressed us most, though, was the profusion of river fish of every kind, none of which we had ever seen before. There were two-foot long black and white striped catfish, dinner plate sized silver fish, small perch like fish, chunks of a huge fish called paiche, land and river turtles, etc. The most surprising specimen was an 8 to 12 inch black, horned fish looking like some sort of mini-prehistoric monster. These poor things, gasping for breath and slowly moving their tails, were displayed in mounds on table after table.

Iquitos fish market

prehistoric looking fish

grubs or ??

Paiche on its way to a restaurant near you. (These fish are found through out the Amazon Basin and can reach 10 feet in length and over 500 pounds.)

In addition, there was a profusion of bush meat, including monkeys, javali, deer, capybara, nutrias and plus other unidentified piles of meat. Farther down the market we were told that there were live wild animals for sale.

We drew the line at that and took our moto-taxi off to the manatee rescue center, a half-hour bone shaking ride outside of town.

Manatee is a preferred dish of the local people, especially those who live in the up-river jungle. They often slaughter these 6-foot long, 200-pound mammals for food and keep the cute babies as pets. The rescue center tries to recover these babies, raising them to return to the river in young adulthood. We were joined at the center by other local visitors who participated in the feeding of the older manatees and by caressing their heads. One guy even fed the manatees bananas mouth-to-mouth. The main diet of the manatees in the pools is water hyacinth. The center receives support from the Dallas Zoo in the form of special milk for the very young manatees. 

We wondered how these animals could ever be returned successfully to the wild with so much human contact while in the rescue center. Probably the most successful part of the rescue center's mission is the education of local children teaching them that these friendly mammals should not be killed. 

We then came back to the Fitzcarraldo and tried to siesta through blasting music from party central at the pool.

Tomorrow we leave at 10 am by van on a one-hour drive to Nauta on the only road leading out of Iquitos. At its end in Nauta, we will meet the Clavero boat for our one-week cruise into the Pacaya-Samiria Nature Preserve. 

There will be a resulting one-week lull in our posts.