Twilight silhouettes the complex pattern of Mayan palaces, pyramids and temples that have risen over the centuries at Uxmal. [Photo courtesy of The Mexico Ministry of Tourism]

By car from Merida, the Yucatan capital, it takes only minutes to travel centuries and witness the enormity of Mayan culture more than a thousand years ago. And just as quickly, one returns to sample the beauty of the Yucatan peninsula today.

By CHRIS SHERMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 6, 1998

ERIDA, Mexico -- Mexico Highway 261 gets off to a dirty, bumpy start in the scruffy port town of Progreso, but it quickly opens into a well-lit, divided highway heading through thousands of years of history into the warm heart of the Yucatan.

Mayan god carved in stone. [Times photo: Chris Sherman]

Before you drive 30 minutes, you can be in Dzibilchaltun, one of the largest Mayan cities, busy with people and trade for more than 1,500 years before the Spanish arrived. You can walk the remains of mile-long stone causeways, from tumble-down temples to the crude Spanish church that crumbled just the same.

Never heard of Dzibilchaltun? Its ruins are modest compared to the towering pyramids of Chichen Itza or Uxmal. Yet Dzibilchaltun is one of dozens of remnants of the vast and sophisticated culture that once flourished from the Yucatan to Honduras. And this site's exceptional museum provides a fine one-stop introduction to that history.

And directly beyond Dzibilchaltun lies much more you may not know about the Yucatan and Mexico.

In minutes you'll pass the giant department stores and fast-food outlets on the fringe of Merida, which signal you are entering a modern city of almost 1-million people. Merida, the Yucatan capital, is at once affluent and disturbingly poor, but as the Yucatecans proudly note, unusually tranquillo.

The highway soon empties onto the Paseo de Montejo, a broad boulevard lined for 10 blocks with massive monuments and beaux-arts mansions of Merida's golden age, a Champs Elysees of the tropics built at the turn of this century.

A few quick turns and you are on Calle 60, through the narrow streets of the town Spanish colonists built over the earlier Mayan city of T'ho.

Peek through the big wooden doors or iron gates of almost any home, hotel or public building, and you'll see a patio filled with palms and flowers lined with arched colonnades.

In the center is the plaza mayor, the patio for the entire city. It is a vast square on which sit the government palaces, sidewalk cafes and a massive 450-year-old church.

Arrive on Sunday and you'll have to walk Calle 60; the street is closed to traffic. At the small plaza of Santa Lucia, locals fill an outdoor dance floor to the sounds of a Yucatecan big band before noon, while vendors sell used books, flavored shaved ice and corn on the cob spiced with lime and chili pepper.

In the larger plaza mayor, small children blow bubbles and play with balloons, families rent quadricycles to pedal around town like paddle boats on a pond, and everyone laughs at clowns and acrobats. When it gets dark, more bands strike up.

Such genteel fiestas are not only on Sundays. On Monday nights, there's the music, songs and poetry of the vaquerria -- Yucatecan cowboys -- and maybe a children's troupe dancing to a staccato beat while balancing bottles of the local Montejo beer on their heads. And every night of the week in some plaza, music and festivities are scheduled.

Tourists pull cameras out of their fannypacks, of course, but the recreation is chiefly "for the people," said Felix Rubio Villanueva, a tourism promoter who frequently takes his wife dancing, "but naturally visitors are invited, too."

Daytime, they should stop among the city's half-dozen museums, including one devoted to Yucatecan song and composers, the art galleries and grand theaters.

A tricycling taxista stops for a schoolboy near a 400-year-old church on the plaza in Uman just outside Merida. [Times photo: Chris Sherman]

Staying in Merida also allows you to see the complexities and problems of modern Mexico up close, where the fancy Bella Epoca restaurant sits next to Burger King and outside it, young men sell hammocks made in their villages and an old woman begs for spare change.

Yet beggars are scarce, most police are unarmed and people are so civil they stand in polite lines at bus stops; horses drawing tourist carriages wear plastic bags under their tails.

Look around the plaza mayor and you'll see hints of a new openness and the beginnings of democracy: At the governor's palace, occupied by the ruling party, the patio and its beautiful murals are open to the public and are guarded by police with empty holsters.

At the municipal palace, held by the opposition, the mayor and his staff set up folding tables on the sidewalk on Citizen Wednesdays and listen to the problems of all comers.

Merida is also a comfortable, inexpensive base for exploring the Yucatan.

For years, travelers reached the Yucatan's ruins and resorts only on quickie flights, cruise-ship daytrips, package tours or arduous overland trips. As of last month, however, you can drive here quickly: this peninsula, which sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico, has finally touched Florida via twice-weekly car-ferry service from Tampa.

The quiet charms of the distinctive natural and cultural beauty haven't changed, however. The Yucatan is so deep in Mexico that it is more tipico of the country than the rowdy border towns or the frightening jumble of Mexico City. It is so close to Central Anerica and the Caribbean that it is also diferente -- and so independent that it once flirted with secession.

A broad, flat peninsula with no rivers or mountains, the Yucatan's limestone shelf is frequently pierced with caverns and sinkholes, or cenotes, which have provided fresh water to human and beast since before the Mayans. The land is covered with low brush and jungle; everywhere is the henequen plant, a sword-shaped cactus whose fiber made rope for the world -- and a fortune for the Yucatan.

The landscape's dusty browns and gray greens are a perfect backdrop for bright tropical flowers, pink flamingos and turquoise seas, men in crisp white guayaberas and women in white huipiles bordered by garlands of embroidery.

What rises from the ground is different, too.

The stone pyramids and observatories of the Mayans are unlike those of the Aztecs. The churches are not like the gilded cathedrals of central Mexico either: Their majesty is in simple stone walls that rise to barrel-vaulted ceilings 100 feet high. Homes range from rude Mayan huts -- roofed as often with rusted, corrugated metal as with thatch -- to grand haciendas.

The greatest distinction is in the people, an obvious mixture of the European Spanish and smaller, finely featured Mayans. But it was a harsh mix: The collision of the two cultures produced a bloody civil war between "whites" and natives that lasted half of the 19th century.

Today the Yucatecan hat of choice is not a sombrero but a finely woven Panama. Although Yucatecans eat tacos, they prefer cochinita (a pork dish) or pollo pibil (chicken wrapped in banana leaves, and they season with lime as much as with chili. They do like the blaring mariachi music of Guadalajara, but their hearts are full of romantic ballads played by soft guitar trios accented with sounds imported from Cuba and Colombia.

The region around Merida offers a taste of all this and a good starting point for more. Although major hotel chains have luxury high-rises along Paseo Montejo, the central city has the best buys. Large rooms in hotels set in beautiful colonial homes and buildings range from $30 to $85 a night in a five-star lodging. Budget travelers can find accommodations for as little as $4 (share a bathroom and bring your own lock).

You can have a sandwich and juice in the market for $1, lunch with a cerveza or two for $5 and gourmet dinner for $20.

From Merida, travelers have access to the entire Yucatan peninsula, which is divided among three pie-shaped states. To the west is Campeche, a more rugged state with an equally old colonial capital, fine hunting and fishing and roads west to Mexico City and south to the Mayan ruins of Palenque and the highlands of Chiapas.

Four hours east is the booming, glitzy state of Quintana Roo; the route is shorter on a new, limited-access toll road. The crystal-clear Caribbean and a coast lined with resorts and condos draw serious divers and partiers to crowded Cancun and towns all the way down to the Belize border.

Meanwhile, the Yucatan state, which is in the center of the peninsula that the Mayans called the land of deer and pheasant, abounds with history, fishing, spelunking, cave-diving and bird-watching. Within a half-day's radius of Merida you can trace the evolution of the Americas from prehistory on.

The Biosphere Preserve around the dusty fishing village in Celestun is close to the primeval state Florida might have been before humans arrived. Seas are full of stone crab, grouper and snapper (try two rubio fresh from the grill with tortillas and beer for $2.50) and the super-saline mangrove wetlands hold a rainbow of water birds and thousands of greater flamingos.

Here, flamingos are not creatures of cartoons but wild birds of exceptional natural beauty. "They are a key indicator of the quality of the environment" explains David Bacab Ortiz, who studied ornithology at Cornell and now provides expert guide service on boats that tour the local lagoon.

During December and January, flamingos gather in flocks of 5,000 or more; at any time of year they are so numerous they look like long strings of pink fishing buoys visible half a mile away. Boatmen no longer flush them for tourists' cameras, but you'll always see a few take graceful flight, a spectacle unseen in a zoo or theme park.

To explore the human civilizations that arose here, head south, again on Mexico 261, into the Puuc Hills, the main rumple in the flat landscape. Although ancient ruins abound in the Yucatan, this part of La Ruta Maya offers the most convenient and diverse collection of archaeological sites.

Start in the caverns at Loltun, where prehistoric drawings are found among the stalactites and stalagmites.

Then enter the Maya world through some of its less-visited ruins, such as the great palace at Sayil, the archway at Labna and the many faces of the rain god Chaac, at Kabah. Most of the sites are still being restored and are yours to explore.

If you have time, stop in the village of Santa Elena, where the Spanish planted a 100-foot tall church on a hill as a lonely outpost of their faith, and where dogs, pigs and turkeys wander the streets.

Then move on to Uxmal, the second-most visited ruins in the Yucatan -- and possibly the most beautiful. At the center, a tight complex of pyramids, observatory, esplanades, a plaza, ball court and cenote are set among trees and slopes that invite rest and reflection in constantly shifting shadows.

You can tour the Puuc in a very long day trip, winding up in Uxmal before dark for the nightly sound and light show. Stay the night and you can revisit the ruins in the quiet of the morning before the first tour buses arrive.

For a closer look at the Puuc, make your base in Ticul or Oxkutzcab. Accommodations are modest but these small tipico towns, their craftspeople and markets are the source of most of the fine leather, pottery and other folk art sold in Merida.

To see the imprint of the European colonists, head east and south, where Spanish architecture, not ruins, dominates the countryside. The most massive are "convents," vast encampments more like fortresses, raised up high so the conquerors could monitor their new subjects. There is an entire convent route, which suggests that these areas once had the largest Mayan populations to subjugate.

Most dramatic is Izamal, popular with Mexican tourists as la ciudad amarillo (the yellow city). Its hilltop Franciscan convent and the buildings along the streets and plazas below are all painted a mustard yellow, trimmed with white.

Lined with arcades and colonnades, and crowned with a huge simple church, Izmal is a triumph of colonial architecture and classical town layout, as pleasing as if Thomas Jefferon or the ancient Romans had built it. It is also where Pope John Paul II came to celebrate Mass with the descendants of the Mayans, whose pyramids still stand immediately next to the convent.

Tourists are also rediscovering a less-religious artifact of European civilization in the old henequen plantations and haciendas. In the 19th century, the fiber was the true gold of the Yucatan, as cotton was in the U.S. South, and it provided a life of luxury for its gentry that collapsed with the arrival of nylon.

Recently, entrepreneurs have restored a few of the dozens of abandoned, overgrown estates into resorts that offer history, elegance and seclusion.

Perhaps the grandest is Hacienda Katanchel, which still seems abandoned as you bump down a one-lane dirt road through a tunnel of scrub forest. At the end, however, is a magnificent planter's mansion painted in deep red and white and richly decorated. Here, power vacationers pay $300 a night to decompress in luxurious languor, staying in any of the three dozen stucco cottages, originally built for plantation workers and staff. Without air conditioning, they are cooled only by the shade of the overgrowth, droopy ceiling fans and huge screen doors. Fish ponds control the mosquitoes.

The grounds are lit by twinkling candlelights (and guest flashlights) and buildings connected by a narrow-gauge rail plied by a pony-drawn truk once used to haul crops. Meals are taken in a former machine shed, now a dining room with a 20-foot-high ceiling and half its walls open to the lush foliage.

Those who can't stay come for business lunches or dinner, where classic Mexican dishes such as lime soup, crepes with huitlacoche (the Mexican truffle), and chicken with pumpkin-seed sauce get gourmet preparation and presentation.

A short distance from Merida -- in the opposite direction and price level -- the small suburb of Uman offers a taste of everyday life that is just as enjoyable.

While other tourists speed past in buses, the few who stop in Uman can join worshipers in a 400-year-old church, shop in a traditional market or fill a tray in the bakery with a dozen pastries for under $2.

During fiesta times, traveling carnivals set up used foosball tables on the plaza, and a 30-piece orchestra from Merida plays. On a normal day, however, tricycle taxis pedal people to market or to the hospital and back home. Mid-morning traffic stops to let hundreds of kindergarteners in striped shorts and playsuits walk hand-in-hand to the playground.

Yet you cannot miss the past when you step into a cathedral whose stones were first assembled 450 years ago. Nor when you get lost in a public market that sprawls for blocks. Continuing the old ways, merchants sell freshly butchered chickens with embryonic eggs exposed, live beetles bejeweled with colored glass, medicinal herbs, plaster saints, tomatoes as pretty as flowers.

And flowers are everywhere. Women squatting on the floor of the market sell blossoms for a few pesos as readily as they sell squash and peppers, for flowers nourish life here, too.

You can't take them or the beetles home with you. But it's now an easy drive back to the Yucatan.

If you go

MONEY: The peso is currently valued at approximately 10 to the U.S. dollar. The best exchange rate is always at banks. Automatic tellers with access to U.S. accounts can be found in most large towns and cities, but should be used only during the daytime: Thieves often wait to rob ATM users at night

ACCOMMODATIONS: Merida has hotels in all price ranges, from backpacker hostels to branches of Hyatt, Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and Fiesta American. In the central city, Hotel Mision Merida, Casa del Balam and Hotel Los Aluxes offer full services, air conditioning and local charm for $65 to $85 a night -- and the Hotel Caribe delivers the same for approximately $35 a night.

Most elaborate and secluded lodging is at Hacienda Katanchel 30 minutes east of Merida.

FOOD: Most expensive restaurants specialize in international cuisine, from Continental and Italian to American staples. The Yucatan's own standards -- sopa de limon, pollo pibil, cochinita and ceviche of local seafood -- can be found in all price ranges, from loncherias in the market to upscale restaurants with lovely patios in the center of Merida. The top restaurants with local fare are Virrey de Mendoza and Los Almendros.

A surprising specialty among street vendors is kibi, a ground meat dish borrowed from Lebanese immigrants to the Yucatan. Bottled water is widely available.

SHOPPING: Best buys here are Panama hats, guayabera shirts, huipiles and other dresses, jewelry of silver and onyx, pottery, wood carvings, hammocks and other crafts made of stone, cotton and rope.

TOURING: Package tours of Mayan ruins, colonial cities and other sites can be purchased through travel agencies in Merida. Visitors can also travel on public transportation or rent cars by the day or week, starting with Volkswagens for approximately $30 a day.

Many historical parks charge admission of approximately $5; at larger sites, it is wise to hire English-speaking guides.

The Yucatan does not have the high rate of violent crime reported in Mexico City, but travelers should always be cautious displaying valuables and should avoid traveling in isolated areas.

TIME: Merida is on Central Standard Time, one hour earlier than Florida, which may make it easier for travelers to arise early, as Yucatecans do. That way you can get the most out of the daylight, get to markets at their busiest (8 and 11 a.m.) and avoid traveling at night.

DRIVING: The flat terrain of the Yucatan has some of the best roads in Mexico, and unleaded gasoline is available at all Pemex stations. Nonetheless, foreign drivers should exercise caution.

Gas stations are available only in major towns and cities; fill up before heading into the country. Mechanics in Mexico are good but new parts can be very expensive and hard to come by, so have your vehicle in good condition before leaving.

Directional signs are scarce in many towns and for long distances between, so have a good map and don't hesitate to stop frequently to ask directions.

Only a few highways are lit at night, and all roads are used at all hours by a combination of animals, bicycles, pedestrians, heavy trucks and by small buses and vans that make frequent stops. Be extremely cautious during bad weather. The U.S. State Department warns against driving at night and warns against travel on the roads in the far south of the Yucatan between Chetumal and Villahermosa.

Always allow more time for driving on routes new to you.

The People's Guide to Mexico by Carl Franz is recommended for anyone unfamiliar with driving in Mexico or for those planning an extended trip by car or truck.