Travel: Target for '68

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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.