PUGO, La Union—The municipal government here has launched the month-long 1st Tinungbo Festival to help bring back the old ways of cooking food with the use of available indigenous materials like bamboo.
Mayor Priscilla M. Martin said the crowd-drawing event will help spur the town’s ecotourism potential and empower those in the agriculture industry here to increase the production of available lowland crops to be sold to residents and visitors.
The festival was opened simultaneously with the celebration of the town’s 105th founding anniversary through an agro-industrial trade fair, featuring the various produce and handicrafts from the 14 barangays of this fifth-class municipality.
“We want to develop an identity for our town so that we will be able to have a share of the exodus of tourists to our neighboring localities like Baguio City. We want to make known to the global village that Pugo has something to be proud of,” Martin stressed.
The festival took its name from the local dialect’s “tinungbo,” an indigenous way of cooking rice and fresh water and other local delicacies like light young bamboo, locally called “tubong,” grilled over charcoal or low fire.
With their vast plantation of light bamboo or bolo along the river banks and mountains here, the old folks of Pugo started the tradition of using raw materials to cook their food.
The mayor wants to revive the practice and celebrating the life and memories it evokes as “a tradition of family love, camaraderie and gratefulness for God’s given treasures to the people of Pugo.”
Over the last century, this traditional way of cooking has been shared among families and friends who spend time along the riverbanks of Pugo such as in Tpuakan, Asin, Sakib, Mangaw, Libtong, Kimmabalyo, Tuon-bato and Cares; Nagbukel in Ambangonan; Baliw and Pimmader in Poblacion West; Amburayan, in Tabora Proper; Pungdol, Panggal and Pantar in Tabora East and Tabora Proper; Sangbay in Cuenca; Kagaling River in Palina; Kapilpilaan and Pottot in Saytan.
During the festival, the public will see regular entertainment every Friday and Saturday until the town’s fiesta on January 20 to 22, 2017 so that residents and visitors will continue to enjoy the activities lined up for the festival.