Off either coast the fisherman will at no time be disappointed: marlin and sailfish are everywhere. For coastal places like San Bias, Puerto Vallarta, and La Paz one should wait until September or October but even here the evenings are delightful through most of the year, and the incomparable deep-sea fishing of Old World La Paz is at its best from July through October. It is a good time, too, for fiestas and, from October, for bullfights. The heat is broken (its peak comes in May or June), the rains are more pleasure than nuisance. The best of the year (and the least crowded) is late summer and fall. The rainy season, beginning in June, brings a parched land to life. It is also the dry season, and for most tastes it is too dry except along the coasts - dry almost to desiccation in many places. The high season for travel (December to March) is high mainly because a lot of Americans are on the run from snow and cold. In December and January at altitudes above 5000 feet it can be very chilly indoors, but outside the sun is warm. The seasonsįrom mountain plateau to tropical coastline, the traveler can change his climate in an hour or two: it is altitude, rather than latitude or season, that makes the great difference. At the center of Mexico, Mexico City thrusts itself skyward down below are the remains of an Indian culture. Every year new excavations reveal more surprising riches of pre-Columbian Mexico: see Palenque, Tula, Kabah, Tulum, Uxmal, as well as the betterknown Maya ruins of Yucatán. In friendly Oaxaca vigorous Zapotec and Mixtec Indians file in from the mountains to trade in this important market outside the town are ruins to be compared with those of Egypt. Veracruz leads the old, easy life of a seaport - good food, sidewalk cafés, marvelous fishing, music, beaches, an exuberant people - as gay and lively as any European equivalent. Monterrey - with its industry, its modern church, its Institute of Technology - reaches as far into the future as any American city. In its depths are hundreds of Indian villages where witchcraft is practiced, where no Spanish is spoken, where men hunt with the bow and arrow and make with their hands six thousand kinds of craft work. On its surface are clusters of stately, serene colonial towns, gems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It contains almost limitless wilderness, a hunter’s paradise. On the one hand are the ruins of a greal aboriginal civilization and on the other, contemporary architecture of a quantity and boldness unequaled in our country. It is a subcontinent, a complex civilization, volcanic in its mixture of cultures. This country is not a resort, a vacationland, though it has been so contrived in a few places. The new Mexico is open, accessible everywhere. An efficient network of airports and airlines has grown up. The railroads have been improving - without losing that quality of leisureliness and a gay good time that has always been their forte. Over terrain that was sometimes impossible the roads have been driven through. But now things have changed, almost overnight. Movement, it is true, has heretofore not been easy: the roads were often inadequate or nonexistent the railroads were obsolete or nonexistent. And as tourists we have moved in ruts from Mexico City to Taxco, to Cuernavaca, to Acapulco. ONLY in the past ten years have Americans in any numbers come to see Mexico.
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