'Biyahe ni Drew' and Zambales' Mango Festival: Drew Arellano joins mango-eating contest

If you’ve ever been to a market and heard mango vendors luring you in with “Zambales ito,” you know what we’re talking about.

Sweet juicy mangoes are the star product of Zambales, a province just three hours from Manila. It’s a quiet province without much luxury or pretension. The resorts are simple, and the powder-sand beaches of nearby islets are marked with plain wooden signs: “Entrance fee P50. Kubo P100.” Food-wise, you’ll find the usual seafood and buko juice, plus a couple of charming cafes – nothing fancy that merits “only in Zambales” bragging rights. Except, that is, for their mangoes.

Each year, the 13 municipalities of Zambales come together to celebrate the Zambales Mango Festival. We’re talking mango-eating contests, mango-carving competitions, and more.

This year, Drew Arellano and GMA News TV’s “Biyahe ni Drew” joined the weekend-long festivities. Here’s what went down.



The Mango Festival, as all festivals do, began with a marching band around town. Inside the festival grounds, culinary students took out their knives for the mango-carving contest. The culinary students worked their magic on green mangoes, cutting intricate patterns into the fruit.




A few meters away, the mango eating contest was about to begin. The mechanics were simple: Each contender has five mangoes -- no knife to peel them or anything -- to finish as quickly as possible. The moment the emcee screamed “Go!” it became clear that Drew had bitten off more than he could chew.



The winner of the contest was Marie, a 28-year old mother of three who finished her mangoes in an astounding one minute and twenty-one seconds.

She told “Biyahe ni Drew” that she didn’t practice in advance, but just really wanted to bring home the cash prize and bragging rights: “Gusto ko lang manalo para sa mga anak ko.”

While mangoes are at the forefront of Zambales’ festival, it’s also a chance for municipalities to showcase their other products.

At the “Little Zambales” trade fair, each municipality had a booth selling everything from chubby garden tomatoes to carabao milk pastillas to furniture to hydroponic vegetables that you can raise in your garden.

One of the perks of being part of the “Biyahe ni Drew” crew is that breaks in the shooting schedule are never boring.

Since the Mango Festival took place on the last day of filming for the “Biyahe ni Drew” Zambales episode (watch out for it this summer!), there was enough time for everyone to buy mangoes for pasalubong, grab a cone of sorbetes, and enjoy the festivities.



If you plan on buying some of Zambales’ famous mangoes, there’s no better time to do it than the mango festival. Each year, vendors line the street outside the fairgrounds, selling mangoes for P60 to P80 a kilo, depending on the size. They even have heavy-duty cardboard boxes that can hold up to ten kilos of the fruit – a modern-day version of the kaing.




Development in Zambales has admittedly been uneven and concentrated in the trade-centric municipalities like Subic and Olongapo, but the Mango Festival offers something else: a celebration of simple joys and a simpler life in the province. –PF, GMA News