Target for '68

Mexico has been invaded before. Complained a Mayan of the Spanish conquistadors: "They shriveled up the flowers. Without knowledge, without valor, without shame, they had only come to castrate the sun. And the sons of their sons stayed among us, and we only received their bitterness."

Today the country is undergoing another kind of invasion and faring far better under the onslaught. This year 1,300,000 U.S. tourists will journey south of the border to savor the strangeness and delights of a New World country that counts history in millenniums, boasts attractions as varied as jet-set seaside resorts and ancient Indian ruins (see color pages). What's more, with the Olympics scheduled to open in Mexico City on Oct. 12, this will be a billion--' dollar year for Mexican tourism--the biggest ever. Mexicans are going all out to make a stay in their country one long fiesta and to turn the Olympics into "a party for the whole world."

semples & Turboprops. "A magnificent landscape; but one looks at it with a sinking of the heart; there is something profoundly horrifying in this immense, indefinite not-thereness of the Mexican scene," Aldous Huxley wrote in the days when tourists traveled on bumpy roads across the sere, dusty landscape. The jet age has gone far to remove the boredom that made one Texas lady remark: "It's what's between the high spots that depresses me so." Today, there are eleven daily direct jet flights into Mexico City from the U.S.;

Acapulco, top Pacific Coast beach resort, has no less than 83 international jet flights each week. Even such a recently discovered beach resort as Puerto Vallarta, made famous by the film The Night of the Iguana, is now rushing to completion its own $3,300,000 jet airfield, installing the town's first dial telephones and nearly doubling hotel accommodations.

Pink Delights. As a result of an ambitious road-building program and a steadily expanding network of airfields, the archaeological digs of Yucatan, the baroque colonial Spanish cities and the splendid beaches are now only a few hours' drive or flight apart. Archaeological buffs, for instance, land in modern turboprops on the recently completed crushed-limestone runway beside the ruined temples of Chichen Itza. And in Mexico City (called simply Mexico by most Mexicans), workers labor round the clock, topping off new big-city hotels and readying the Olympic facilities.

To first-timers still harboring old border-town images, Mexico City comes as a happy shock. No sleepy campesinos wrapped in serapes and buried under sombreros greet today's deplaning visitor. Instead, the tourist passes through the hands of efficient English-speaking customs officials and aggressively obliging skycaps into a cab.

From the very beginning of the 20-minute drive in from the airport, there is no mistaking the fact that Mexico City is foreign. Open-air markets and tortilla stands line the route. Oblivious to the rushing traffic, an occasional sandal-footed Indian shuffles along the side walks. Not until the cab bursts onto the elegant Paseo de la Reforma, a leafy eight-lane boulevard patterned after the Champs Elysees and flanked by smart shops, restaurants and first-class hotels, does the realization strike home that the city is also a sophisticated, modern metropolis (pop. 7,000,000).

The city, with its mixture of bustle, friendliness, modern buildings, historic landmarks and vivid public murals, has a peculiar appeal to U.S. tourists.

Globe-trotting Europeans tend to put it down as "not really in the vanguard of things, like Rome and Paris. The pace is too slow." New Yorkers, by contrast, find it "completely different, refreshing."

Most U.S. tourists soon discover the shopping delights of the Zona Rosa (so called for its pink stone buildings), and the spacious greenery of 9,000-acre Chapultepec Park, among the best designed, most used outdoor recreation areas in the Western world. Social Mexico patterns itself on Madrid, and Americans must get used to the fact that lunch seldom begins before 2 p.m., often lasts past 4 p.m., and that dinner doesn't start till 9 p.m. at the earliest.

No matter how late to bed, chances are that tourists this year will be awakened early by the sound of construction. The city is already gripped by Olympics fever, and while many of the facilities for the games are not new, work is going on round the clock to fin> ish on schedule additional major sports structures scattered about the city. To take care of the visitors, four new major hotels are being rushed to completion; plus half a dozen smaller tourist hotels. To accommodate an anticipated overflow, the Committee on Housing is blocking off space in Acapulco, Guadalajara and other tourist spots within good plane commute, in the hope that sports fans will take side trips for a day or so, thus easing the burden on the city.

Snakes & Boots. Few visitors come away from Mexico without being impressed by the country's sense of--and pride in--its past, ranging from its early Indian founders to its recent revolutions. In few New World countries is the past more easily--or impressively --evident to visitors. Best introduction is Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park (TIME, June 25, 1965), considered by many experts to be the best archaeological museum in the world.

Tourists who wish to visit the actual archaeological sites need not leave the limits of Mexico City. At the edge of the University City is Cuicuilco, a truncated cone 450 ft. in diameter, built by pre-Mayan primitives some 8,500 years ago. It is illustrative of the city's multilayered history that while excavating for the Olympic village, bulldozers uncovered yet another pyramid, long suspected to exist but never located. Thirty minutes by toll road from Mexico City is the most monumental of all, Teotihuacan, a 300-acre pre-Aztec ruin dominated by two massive pyramids. Visitors who want to see excavations under way will make the 90-min. jet hop to Merida, jumping-off point for the two great Mayan ruins in Yucatan Chichen Itza and Uxmal.

Hardest to reach is Palenque ("City of the Snakes"), which Jacqueline Kennedy last March hailed as "more fascinating than Angkor Wat." Set in a dense rain forest, the city, which was first inhabited several centuries B.C., boasts the Temple of Inscriptions--the first Mexican pyramid discovered that was used as a tomb--and the Queen's Bath, a natural waterfall into which Jackie impetuously jumped, boots and all.

"I intend to come back and see a new archaeological site each year until I die," said one Californian. "And there will always be more." The same could be said of Mexico's colonial cities, some of them now designated as national cultural monuments. Aficionados of Mexico's Spanish past argue endlessly as to which is their favorite: Cuernavaca, with its famed cathedral; Taxco, with its quaint charm and silversmiths; some prefer Guadalajara, the country's second biggest city; San Miguel de AI-lende, where Spanish silver barons built majestic stone mansions; or the former mining town of Guanajuato, near by.

Flight to Serenity. Unabashed sybarites skip all the history, head straight for the beaches. Still supreme among Mexican resorts is Acapulco. Movie stars stay up in the hills, either at the Villa Vera, or the Acapulco Towers. Also on the hillside: Las Brisas, a collection of pink cottages, each with a pool, that in a given week this spring included among its guests Martin Luther King Jr., Russian Poet Evgeny Evtushenko, Chuck and Lynda Robb and Astronaut Gwen K. Garriott. The big beach hotels do nicely for the hoi polloi, so many of whom are honeymooners that the No. 1 song played by Acapulco orchestras is a cha-cha version of the Wedding March. So rapid has been the development of Acapulco that those who value serenity are now fleeing to Zihuatanejo, with no night life, no notable restaurants and fewer than 100 rooms.

Wherever they go, some tourists, to be sure, will find the pleasures of Mexico mixed. To enjoy the very foreignness that gives the visitors the exhilarating sense of being far away while still close to home, it is also necessary to come to terms with the special Mexican ambiente. The manana era may be over, but it has been succeeded by hay tiempo ("there's time"). Some hotels have clocks with no hands, apparently to prove that time does not count. Sometimes hay tiempo also means late planes, canceled tours and misplaced hotel reservations. "We're trying as hard as we can to be more efficient," says one tour official, "but the tourist must forgive. Relax, maybe something nice will happen to you."

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