Que Viva Mexico!

Playboy's travel editor

Mexico city today is a combination of Vienna in the Nineties and Paris in the Twenties – just a few hours by air from most major cities of the U.S. OK, the tourists do get underfoot, and parts of it may take on the cornball flavor of an amusement park. But it's got a thoroughly civilized, vibrantly alive, magnificently artistic culture, and we like to sample it two or three times a year.

The merry-go-round starts almost as soon as we get there. No Mexican ever greets anyone at the airport at a decibel less than a full bellow, and our friend is no exception. "Hola, viejo," comes the roar, "que tal?" And he'll rush forward, grab our hand and pound us on the back, all the while chattering a fast stream of details about all the things he's lined up for us during the next few days. We've a choice of a dozen plays, a couple of concerts by the National Symphony, eight or nine gallery showings of young Mexican artists, three or four charity balls, up to a dozen sporting events, at least five cocktail parties; then there's the mammoth fiesta at Remedios, complete with fireworks, firewater and masked dancers.

In a few minutes, we're in and through the brightly modern airport terminal, our luggage consigned to our hotel, and we're off in a brisk stream of strangely silent traffic (horn tooting is outlawed).

Still in traveling clothes, we zip through smart suburbs and land at our friend's 12-room "studio," tastefully furnished in brilliant colors and a lot of Miller furniture, to be introduced to a wonderful, noisy crowd. The odds are strongly against a visitor being allowed to recover quietly from the trip and the cocktails on the plane, but there are additional pleasant pitfalls which the partying new arrival must face. (continued on page 68) Mexico (continued from page 49) Mexico city sits sunning itself at an altitude of 7500 feet above sea level. At that height, gentle reader, a shakerful of frosty Martinis packs double the wallop it does back home. For another, there are the cocktail "snacks" that are spread out in profusion: chunks of chorizos sausages murmurous with garlic, spicy guacamole avocado dip, mashed frijola beans topped with tortilla strips. They're so inflamed with ginger and chili that a spoonful does nicely if you don't plan to peel the skin from more than half your palate. It takes a day or two of large Mexican lunches between 1:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon before you learn to treat the voluptuous cocktail buffets as just snacks, so as to enjoy dinner.

We had ours that night at the elegantly Napoleonic Jena restaurant, caught the late floor show at E1 Patio, then headed out in a group for the rough Lagunilla district to chuckle at the women wrestlers at E1 Golpe; then on to the Cafe Tenampa, where roving bands of mariachi guitarists milk the defenseless tourists for a peso a song for each of the five bandsmen. Then we strolled Republic of Panama Street, one of the wide-openest red-light districts in the world, whose shrill slatterns include a rare attractive girl. Finally, we sampled the raw maguey cactus liquor, pulque, at one of the garish little pulquerias on and around Plaza Garibaldi. "Have a drink," goes the toast among the bibulous students and drifters there. "Have a drink and be somebody."

Most Mexicans are somebody in the best possible way: they're vivid and individualistic. What's more, we're convinced, all Mexicans are tireless and rich, as well. They must be, for no one ever seems to sleep or work – pointless, perhaps, in a land where conservative bank stock pays 10 percent and a risk isn't really speculative until it offers a 20 to 25 percent return. Contrary to tourist legend, Mexicans aren't all out to clip the gringo either. On an earlier trip, we found ourselves embarrassingly out of cash to the point that we had to wave the airport porter away from our bags because we didn't have enough for a tip. "Que importe, señor?" he smiled when we explained. "What is money between friends?" and he shouldered our duffle. That's true, so help us.

If you're a tourist traveling to Mexico City for the first time, the problem of "what to do" is easily solved by discovering what day of the week it is (this can be accomplished by purchasing a newspaper). Thus, on Friday, you chase over to Toluca for the colorful Indian Market. True, you can find a greater variety of fine handicrafts at fixed prices in the government-backed National Museum of Popular Arts on Avenida Juarez – but you don't get to haggle there, and it's not as much fun. If you miss the Indian Market, there's always the overflowing Merced Market and the food-fruit-flower market around Calle Dolores.

If it happens to be Sunday when you look at the paper over breakfast at Sanborns (or at Vicky's, an odd sort of a Czech spot with oilcloth-covered tables and little choice of food, which opens for breakfast, keeps going with some very fine eating through lunch and closes as soon as it runs out of food, usually right after lunch) then you've a wider choice. You hot-foot it around the corner from Sanborns to the Palace of Fine Arts for the once-a-week display of the great glass curtain showing the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtacihuatl. Other days this huge state-sponsored cultural center is fun, too – thronged with peasants, students and socialites off to plays, operas, concerts, lectures and art showings in the magnificent galleries frescoed by Diego Rivera and Orozco.

If you're not a tourist but you've got one in tow of a Sunday and he won't settle for golf or tennis, then you do as the Mexicans do and head for Xochimilco or Teotihuacan or Chapultepec Park, from where you can spot the real volcanoes Popo and Ixty, plus scores of candymen, balloon men, street performers and peasant women in full pink skirts under the great ahuehuetl cypress trees, and riders in silver-decked costume on showoff horses. The horsemen, incidentally, are likely to be on their way to the Rancho del Charro, where we rather like to go ourselves for a Mexican-style rodeo and riding exhibition called jaripeo. Or you can move on to San Bartolo Tenayuca's pyramid covered with plumed Aztec serpents or the huge astronomical altars at Teotihuacan, the great stepped pyramids to Sun and Moon that are impressive as all get-out.

Xochimilco is the spot where the water-borne hucksters work the green-scummed canals between the so-called "floating gardens." The earth-laden raft-farms that floated on the lake in Aztec days – growing vegetables and flowers for the capital then as now – have long since taken root, so that the "floating gardens," are more correctly the flower-decked, flat-bottomed lanchas on which you'll be poled around for 20 pesos an hour (or more if you don't bargain before getting in).

Eventually, you may want to drive out through Texcoco – where Cortez launched his lake fleet to threaten Montezuma's capital – to Coatlinchan, where you can hire horses for the short hill climb to the awesome 200-ton Idol of Tecomate. Then to lunch, driving through the cobbled prettiness of Coyoacan, where Cortez headquartered, past the stunning University, to eat at a gardenish sort of place called Rancho del Artista.

At 4:00 P.M. sharp, it's the bullfights and you either like them or you don't – there are no half measures. Your liking depends in part on your understanding of this serious pageantry that pits skill against brawn in the huge arena that can be as hushed as a meadow at one perilous moment, roaring the next to 40,000 voices acclaiming a neat bit of cape work.

We've always enjoyed the top matadors who appear at Plaza Mexico in the December-April season. But the work of the apprentices sweating it out with yearling bulls at other times is often more exciting. The lads take a lot more risks to prove their worth to the talent scouts. Incidentally, stay away from ringside at the Plaza Mexico; take the first or second tendidos on the shady side, called sombra. Ringsiders are likely to be showered with bottles or flaming newspapers if the crowd disapproves of the matador, seat pads and hats if it approves. Good or bad, you get it all at ringside.

To keep the day thoroughly Latin, dinner would be indicated at the bullfight spot, El Taquito, or restaurants that are tops for straight Mexican food, Cafe Tacuba or Flor de Mexico – after, of course, a session at the jai alai fronton, where you need an expert along to keep track of the flying bets and changing odds which are even faster than the world's fastest game.

Or you might want to try Mexican theatre. We're not talking of the rather sawdusty burlesque at the Tivoli or Teatro Margo but of legit theatre, which flourishes for the most part on translations from recent Paris hits acted by a corps of fine Mexican players. There is some semi-professional stuff in English (if your Spanish is more rusty than ours) and of course if there's a movie starring Cantinflas, the Mexican Chaplin, don't miss it.

The day of the week will also help determine some of your other evening activities. Mexican folk dancing, for instance, is well worth seeing, but no one can chase all over the country to catch the various styles. So they're all brought to Mexico City – Fridays at the Rotary Club (as an inexpensive dinner show that has nothing in common with the Rotary, that we could find, except the use of the club quarters) or on Wednesdays at Sala Riveroll, which is still better.

So help us, we always have trouble recommending "just a few" restaurants in Mexico City; so many are so good. But try, if you will, Spanish fare at Centro Vasco, German at Bellinghausen's, Mexican high priced and very cultural at Hosteria de Santo Domingo or student priced and intelligent at La Bodega.

By contrast, we have very decided opinions when it comes to the surrounding countryside. Within a day's drive or so of Mexico City you'll find lush coastal resorts and tiny Indian villages hidden among picture-postcard mountains, wildly baroque cathedrals of imperial Spain and relics of civilizations dating back perhaps 20,000 years.

Touristed as it may be, we can always take a lot of Taxco, an impossibly picturesque silver-mining town on the slope of a mountainside. Best way to enjoy it is with a pre-lunch tequila from the terrace of the Posada de la Mision, overlooking the white walls and red roofs of the village. Then stroll its twisting, cobbled lanes to silver workshops whose wonderful craftsmen will turn out anything at the drop of a wallet.

And then – unless we're flying direct from Mexico City – we'll go right on from Taxco next day to Acapulco for a spot of sun and surf, using the magnificent new toll road cutting around and over the mountains. Acapulco is sheer, concentrated, triple-distilled beauty: a place of rock-girt beaches, fine fishing (in the sea and in local cocktail dispensaries) and also the place where the lads dive into churning seas from the high Quebrada cliffs.

Acapulco is smart, cosmopolitan, expensive and lots of fun. It's also the place where you can charter a small seaplane to fly to Zihuatanejo, a tiny fishing village someone – we think it was Robert Louis Stevenson – once described as more like the South Sea islands than the South Sea islands themselves. You fly, we should add, because the ride there by car is a vertebra-impacting seven to ten hours over roads that cannot be described. Zihuatanejo is an inexpensive spot of dreamy beauty no one knows much about yet. If you're interested, go talk to Carlo Barnard when you're at Acapulco; he runs the Hotel El Mirador there.

There are other dream spots no one has discovered, or few people anyway. One we're prepared to give away for free here is Jocotepec over toward Guadalajara, known to perhaps half a dozen American artists, about 500 Mexican fishermen who pull flashing silver from Lake Chapala, to the Mexican Government Tourist Commission which has plans to develop it soon and to an American by the name of Allen Lloyd who runs the little Hotel La Quinta there. Look him up and tell him we sent you.

You can live in Mexico City on the level you choose: from less than $5 a day to well up over $30. Acapulco runs a little more, other cities a little less. For more information write the Mexican Government Tourist Commission, Avenida Juarez 89, Mexico City. Or, if you're driving, to Sanborn's, 214 South Broadway, McAllen, Texas; by air, to American Airlines, 100 Park Avenue, New York, or Eastern Airlines, 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York; by train, to Mexican Government Railway System, 120 Wall Street, New York.

Avenida Juarez, Mexico City

Fiesta at Taxco

The Village of San Miguel

An Angry Toro, Plaza Mexico