Iquitos, Peru: Belen Market (Part 2 of 4)

To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
http://www.amazon.com/Iquitos-Peru-D-W-Walker/dp/098776151X

Travel is a personal experience so different from one to another that one must wonder if there is such a thing at all as travel or if there is a multiverse of confusion colliding with the indiscriminate manifestation of others one cannot begin to know.

I see things at Belen Market that others seemingly do not see, that being beauty and life intense. Others see the illegal, the forbidden, the ugly and dirty, the dangerous and bizarre. I see life ending and beginning and continuing in all its dirty and violent eruptions. But I travel with the same people who see something altogether otherwise. I don't begin to understand others. I sit and watch and wonder, and I call this traveling. I don't know if I have moved at all.

At the opposite end of town from Belen Market one finds peace

One finds tranquility

Near the entrance at Belen Market one finds stuff.

At the bottom of Belen Market one finds boats

At the bottom of Belen Market one finds junk

At the bottom of Belen Market one finds homes

At the bottom of Belen Market one finds romance

At the bottom of Belen Market one finds promises

Inside Belen Market one finds strangeness

Inside Belen Market one finds common good for all and terror for the confused

From top to bottom at Belen Market, Iquitos, Peru one finds things unlikely to be found in the Modern world. It's a challenge to move among the dogs and vultures and the slime on the muddy paths that separate the buyers from the sellers, the steady from the wandering. I see homes others will never live in, and i see them shudder at the sight of DDT, thinking surely life cannot be so wrong. Monkey skulls on a table. The horror. Filth and decay. And the babies? "They don't do anything with them," as I heard recently.

The market is for life. To me it is a grand mystery. I will come back to it again to attempt an explanation.

 http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/08/belen-market-iquitos-peru.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/08/iquitos-belen-market-2.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/08/belen-market-iquitos-3.html

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html