Travelling to Mexico is provided by numerous airlines, mainly from larger airport in England. So, for Scottish customers, they usually drive down to an airport in the South, parking at one of the airports secured car parks. If you’re flying from London try Heathrow airport parking or alternatively Manchester airport parking at Manchester airport is closer.

If you’re travelling from Edinburgh you may want to consider jumping in an Edinburgh Taxi to take you to the airport. Alternatively, for people travelling longer distances Edinburgh Airport Parking is perfect for all. There’s plenty of choice, just remember to plan your journey well in advance!

In Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, green is never simply green. From the air, green rolls over the unending mountains, intense and damp where there are forests and nubbly like rough felt when the trees end. In the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the hill town in the middle of Chiapas’s central plateau, it’s a shiny layer of Kelly spread thickly across the facade of a Spanish colonial home. In the church of San Juan de Chamula, it’s the toasted green of pine needles strewn across the floor, and it’s the thin threads woven almost invisibly into the white wool tunics of indigenous Chamulan men.

Chiapas green is the golden green of fair-trade coffee beans ready for roasting, and the translucent olive drab of banana leaves wrapped around steaming tamales, and a Day-Glo pear growing in a backyard orchard. Nowhere have I seen so many variations of Kermit the Frog’s uneasy color, and yet there was one place in Chiapas, which I visited over 10 days in October, where green served little to no purpose: my wallet.

Yes, Chiapas is cheap — as is much of Mexico, where the exchange rate has, since September, zoomed from 10 to 13 pesos to the dollar. But Chiapas’s affordability is compounded by its relative obscurity. Apart from the packs of post-collegiate backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few American tourists venture there. Perhaps it’s a fear of the Zapatista rebels, whose 1994 seizure of five Chiapas towns gained them worldwide headlines. Or maybe it’s simply the state’s inaccessibility — at least 12 hours by bus from Cancún, Oaxaca or Mexico City, and about the same by air from the New York area.

Either way, the lack of crowds means that, for not much more than $50 a day, mildly adventurous travelers have unfettered access to lovely colonial towns and indigenous cultures (Indians make up a fifth of the state’s 4.3 million people), to the ancient Maya ruins at Palenque, Bonampak and beyond, to lush, isolated rain forests, to good coffee, to quirky and affordable hotels and even to the shadowy Zapatistas themselves.

I began, as most Chiapas visitors do, in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the nearly 500-year-old Spanish colonial hill town that serves as base camp for exploring the state. Or rather, I would have begun in San Cristóbal if there were regular air service to the city. Instead, I flew into the state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez and took a taxi at a fixed fare of 220 pesos from the airport to the bus station, where I paid 26 pesos for the hourlong bus ride to San Cristóbal. It left just before sunset and was remarkably comfortable, with free bottled water, a coffee station at the rear of the vehicle, and “The Last Mimsy,” dubbed into Spanish, playing on overhead TVs. None of this, however, distracted me from the view out the window: the valley darkening into a deep red glow as we climbed 7,000 feet above sea level into mountains cut through with rivers and illuminated by the clustered lights of villages.

By the time I reached San Cristóbal, a little before 8 p.m., I was energized by the crazily consistent beauty of it all, invigorated by the chilly mountain air and in love with my 550-pesos-a-night accommodations at Na Bolom. Built in 1891 as a hacienda, Na Bolom is much more than a charming hotel compound with mustard-yellow arches, scarlet balconies and more courtyards than I cared to count. It’s also a research institution, founded by the Danish anthropologist Frans Blom and his wife, the Swiss photographer Gertrude Duby. From the 1920s until their deaths (he in 1963, she 30 years later), they documented the cultures of both the ancient Maya and their present-day descendants, in particular the Lacandón, an isolated Indian population that never fell under Spanish (or, for that matter, Mexican) dominion.

Today, Na Bolom — it means Jaguar House in Tzotzil, one of several Mayan languages, but is also a play on Blom’s name — is a testament to their life’s work, with public rooms full of artifacts, a library of tomes on Maya and Mexican history and gallery spaces devoted to contemporary art related to indigenous people. Researchers and resident artists live there, and Indians from distant villages have a place to stay while seeking care at local hospitals. And tourists, when they’re not getting cozy in front of the fireplaces in their reasonably spacious (but somewhat dated) guest rooms, can interact with all of these specialists, often by bumping elbows at the 30-foot-long wooden table in the dining hall.

Well, at least in theory. My dinner that first night — carrot soup, shredded chicken dressed with crema and strips of roasted poblano peppers, and a salad of lettuce, cucumber and avocado — was, if delicious and inexpensive (135 pesos, not including drinks), also a solo affair. And at breakfast each morning, my tablemates tended to be, like me, tourists, some from as far away as South Africa.

But the Frugal Traveler wasn’t about to spend his vacation just hanging around the hotel; I needed to get out into the streets. And San Cristóbal was a city that had me joyously roaming its streets from morning till night. In fact, these lanes, paved with hexagonal stones, may have been the most roamable I’ve seen. Laid out in a rough grid, they climb up and over and down gentle hills until, at the far reaches of this small valley, they end in a ring of green mountains — “crouched all round like large and friendly dogs,” as Graham Greene put it in his travelogue “The Lawless Roads ” — whose distinct peaks locals use for orientation.

The houses were mostly single-story Spanish colonials, mute and nearly windowless but with color schemes that veered from turquoise-and-orange to magenta-and-blue to bold red-and-yellow. Occasionally, their walls bore graffiti and stencil art, sometimes simple political slogans like “The revolutionary acts, not speaks!” But more often they were adorned with clever exercises in absurdism: a pregnant pope; a double-headed Betty Boop with a Devil tail; a woman’s face subtitled “She is in love.” (All, I learned, by an artist named Hakro.) One image, a mariachi playing his guitar on a street corner, was supposedly by Banksy, the British graffiti artist, but his verification office later told me it was fake.

When I looked up past the walls, I could see the smooth domes of centuries-old churches and convents rising from among the crenelated terra-cotta roofs. Some, like the Templo de Santo Domingo, had facades elaborately carved with saints and double-headed eagles; others, like the Templo de El Carmen, had vaulted wood ceilings that perfumed the pews with the scent of the forest.

But more than anything, what distinguished the streets of San Cristóbal were the indigenous people, who wore the traditional outfits of their native towns. Women from Chamula sported black tufted-wool skirts and belts woven with metallic thread. Women from Zinacantán, on the other hand, had black capes and jackets on which were embroidered flowers in the most unearthly shade of blue. As I sat on an outdoor table at the Yik Café, drinking a strong espresso (10 pesos) and watching the Plaza de 31 Marzo, where these colors swirled, Chiapas felt like a place out of time.

“The only place it compares with is maybe Tibet, Nepal years ago,” said Walter Morris Jr., a gray-bearded American anthropologist — better known as Chip — who has lived in San Cristóbal for 35 years. “In terms of leaving your normal space and being with people who truly think differently and who do interesting things, this is about as exotic as you can get within a few thousand miles of the United States and a short plane ride.”

Mr. Morris, who happened to live right behind Na Bolom, is an expert on Maya weaving and tracks the accelerating evolution of indigenous styles. What I’d thought of as traditional outfits, he told me, were actually innovations: Embroidery was a great rarity three decades ago, the dyes are artificial and the designs now change with the seasons.

“Every six months they have a festival,” he said, “and if you’re stylish, you weave up an entire new set of costumes for your family, and have it embroidered at the last minute to decide the palette.”

The place to buy those fashions — whether au courant or so last year — is Sna Jolobil, a weaver’s co-operative in the Templo de Santo Domingo complex. These are the highest of the high end, organized by town of origin and priced according to the amount of work that went into them, with bedspreads reaching into the thousands of dollars. Frugal fashionistas may, however, prefer the artisans market that has grown up in the churchyard, where similar work costs much less. A gray wool poncho from Chamula caught my eye, for example, and as I fingered the luscious fabric, a vendor named the price: 550 pesos.

I blanched, and she instantly dropped it to 135 pesos. The poncho will now keep my wife, Jean, now eight months pregnant, very warm through the winter.

This devotion to craftsmanship extends far beyond textiles. Taller Leñateros, a Mayan stationery workshop, sells woodblock posters (80 pesos), greeting cards and children’s books in Spanish, Tzotzil and English on paper produced from recycled materials. The baristas at the Café Museo Café pull a mean espresso (14 pesos) made from organic beans, and the museum (15 pesos) gives an overview of the cash crop’s history in Chiapas from its introduction in the early 18th century to the formation of co-ops in the last few decades. And the Museo de la Medicina Maya (admission 20 pesos) not only deftly covers the use of plants and animals in indigenous health care but also grows, produces and sells traditional treatments through its pharmacy. (I considered ordering a hen — to be waved over Jean during childbirth — but figured United States Customs might object.)

Artisanship in San Cristóbal also shades quite smoothly into art. Just down the street from the purported Banksy was Galería Studio Cerrillo, where the Basque artist Gorka Larrañaga was showing his light-box paintings of exploding buildings and bridges. Around the corner, three artists — an American, a Swiss and an Italian, all of whom had spent more than a decade in San Cristóbal — were working hard to paint, furnish and open Elisa Burkhard, a hybrid museum-gallery that will showcase local artists as well as the work of its founders. Kinoki, a cultural center and cafe, showed Spanish documentaries as well as Emir Kusturica’s bizarre “Arizona Dream,” starring Johnny Depp and Cybill Shepherd.

Strangely, the one place I had difficulty finding local craftsmanship was at the dinner table. Despite the presence of a big marketplace on the north end of town, with rainbows of beans, pyramids of guavas and tubs of poetically named chilies (paloma blanca, miraciel, simojovel), many of San Cristóbal’s restaurants either served a generic Mexican menu or focused on international cuisine.

Thanks to guidance from Mr. Morris, however, I discovered El Mercadito, primarily a takeout-and-delivery shop but with four booths open at lunchtime. The food is true Chiapanecan, distinct from the moles of Oaxaca and the habanero obsessions of the Yucatán. The azado of pork featured chunks of falling-apart meat in a rich, chili-based sauce that was also delightfully sweet; the fat chile relleno came stuffed not only with pork but with raisins as well; and the plantain croquetas, ordered as a side dish, were saucers of fried, smoky goodness, with a heart of tangy cheese. My two lunches there averaged 70 pesos. So little for so much!

I couldn’t eat every meal at El Mercadito, however, and I did manage to find some worthy alternatives. Chiapanecan tamales were Doña Ame’s specialty, indeed, the restaurant’s main offering, and I gorged on the Chamula, stuffed with pork and steamed in a banana leaf, and the chipilin, cooked in a corn husk with chicken and the bitter, herbaceous leaves of the chipilin plant. At La Viña de Bacco, San Cristóbal’s only wine and tapas bar, I drank a dense Mexican cabernet sauvignon (35 pesos a glass) and munched juicy ham on crusts of bread. I even ate pretty well — more Chiapanecan tamales, plus a lightly tomato-y soup studded with chunks of nopales cactuses — at TierrAdentro, an airy, courtyard-like restaurant run by the Zapatistas.

Yup, those Zapatistas, properly termed the Zapatista National Liberation Army, or E.Z.L.N., whose failed revolution has given Chiapas a frisson of danger. A decade ago, that reputation was well-earned, thanks to the Mexican military’s pursuit of the E.Z.L.N., the massacre of Tzotzil Indians in the village of Acteal and frequent unrelated but frightening raids by bandits who cross the border from Guatemala.

Today, however, the revolution is below a simmer, invisible except for the occasional tortilla shop named “1 de Enero,” a reference to the Jan. 1, 1994, uprising. The revolutionaries still exist, living in autonomous collectives throughout the state, tolerated by the government but limited in their movement. But compared with the drug wars being waged in northern Mexico, a region where the State Department’s Web site warns of rising crime, Chiapas is Switzerland. Subcomandante Marcos, the pipe-smoking, balaclava-clad E.Z.L.N. spokesman, is an object of interest mostly to backpackers and idealists who might find Che Guevara too mainstream.

Except that Marcos and his Zapatistas are well on their way to a Che-like level of fame — and commercialization. When you can eat at a Zapatista restaurant, buy coffee and political artwork from the Nemi Zapata boutique and pick up an iSubcomandante T-shirt from the iPod Tours storefront, does the movement’s anti-globalization message retain any meaning?

In San Cristóbal, however, it hardly seemed to matter. In the evenings, I would find a stool at Revolución or Perfidia, order a Dos Equis and listen to a rock band or flamenco guitarists, then button up my jacket and wander home through the cold, half-lighted lanes, noting new pieces of street art (a praying mantis menacing two businessmen, an “assassin wanted” poster) and not minding one bit if I became lost. After all, I had the mountains — so green at noon, so black in the moonlight — to show me the way home.

AT about 8:30 at night, an artillery-like barrage of fireworks shattered the silence, followed by the oompah of a tuba and the beating of drums. My curiosity aroused, I left the simple wooden cabin in which I was staying and went into the darkness to investigate. I found a slow-moving parade of perhaps 200 people shuffling down the streets of the Mexican village of Santa Ana del Valle, some 20 miles east of the city of Oaxaca. Indigenous Zapotec faces, from the newborn to the elderly, glowed in the flickering light of the candles many carried, along with bouquets of poinsettias, roses, or gladiolus.

A traditional holiday song was chanted in slow repetitions. From flat rooftops lining the route, children showered the marchers with candy; mischievous boys in the street tossed lighted firecrackers back at the kids up above. In the center of the procession, atop a canopied litter and amid a pungent cloud of copal, were Barbie-size figures of Mary and Joseph, with baby Jesus in a basket.

I’d stumbled onto a small-town posada, a ritual re-enactment of the troubles that Mary and Joseph had finding a room at an inn; after visiting two homes where they were turned away, the marchers were at last invited into a third, where more songs were sung, tamales and rice pudding were devoured, and many a piñata was smashed by gleeful children. The only stranger there, I was welcomed warmly. And I was only there because I’d chosen to spend this December night at the cabaña turistica — also known as a yu’u — run by the village, and part of a government-sponsored system of rural lodging spread across the state of Oaxaca.

For prices starting as low as 80 pesos a night per person, or 400 pesos a night for an entire cabin that sleeps four ($7 or $36 at 11 pesos to the dollar), the cabañas offer the best way to get a deeper glimpse of life in Oaxaca’s small pueblos than is possible in a day trip.

Some of the 16 pueblos featuring cabañas offer horseback riding and mountain bike rentals; others tout their scenic locations or traditional handicrafts.

While many of these destinations are featured on Oaxaca’s Spanish-only tourism Web site, www.oaxaca.travel, the best way to decide which to visit is to stop at the state’s tourist information bureau, in Oaxaca city (Murguia 206; 52-951-516-0123). Brochures describe most of the pueblos in the program, and English-speaking staff members can answer questions and phone in reservations, which are recommended.

But traveler beware: The first time I enquired about Santa Ana del Valle, I was told there was no cabaña there. After I pressed the matter, it turned out there was one, and a reservation was made. The caretaker in the village, however, failed to meet my family at the cabaña, resulting in a half-hour hunt for him. Later, when trying to make reservations at Santiago Apoala, phone contact proved impossible, and the information sheet the bureau provided was riddled with inaccuracies. An easier and more efficient way is to go to the office of Expediciones Sierra Norte (52-951-514-8271; www.sierranorte.org.mx), which books lodging and organizes tours for a group of eight pueblos in the cabaña system known as the Pueblos Mancomunados.

In the Sierra Norte mountain range, these pueblos are the heart of Oaxacan ecotourism. They’ve teamed up to create a network of walking and biking trails, linking the villages and creating possibilities for treks up to a week long. Visitors pay a fee of 50 pesos to enter the area, and despite the availability of fantastic trail maps, guides are required even for day hiking, in an effort to create jobs for local people and keep tourists safe. A guide for one to 10 people costs 120 pesos a day.

“I didn’t think we’d need the guide, but we wouldn’t have known where to go without one,” said Brian Hirsch, of Homer, Alaska, who spent a day hiking around the village of Cuajimoloyas with his wife and two daughters, before staying the night in a cabaña there. His daughter, Aviva, 14, said the villagers had been very welcoming and “wanted to make us comfortable,” explaining, “If they can make money off of us coming to see their forest, they won’t have to cut down their trees to sell them.”

For some pueblos, the cabañas have financed schools and health clinics; others have barely recovered their operating expenses. In summer, the Pueblos Mancomunados receive up to about 500 visitors each month; Apoala may get 150; other pueblos see a mere handful.

While the state of Oaxaca has promoted the eco-lodging project for over a decade, each cabaña is run by a local committee. Since committee members are usually performing a year of unpaid mandatory community service, quality control can be inconsistent. “There would definitely be better services if the managers earned a salary,” said Carlos Gutierrez, an Oaxaca state tourism official. “But that’s up to the pueblos.”

In Santa Ana del Valle, a village renowned for its weavers, the cabaña grounds were beautifully tended and the bedding was spotless; the poorly built, thin wooden walls, however, were covered in spider webs and were useless against the freezing night air and the insane ruckus of barking dogs.

In Santiago Apoala — tucked in a dramatic, isolated valley in Oaxaca’s Mixteca region and popular for its waterfall — the newly refurbished cabaña was solid and clean, but a propane leak in the kitchen emitted a slightly noxious aroma and required that windows in the dining room stay open. “It’s dangerous to close those,” warned Hector Guzman, manager of the cabaña. “The place might explode.”

In Benito Juárez, one of the Pueblos Mancomunados, the staff was well organized, but broken reading lights dangled from the cabin’s adobe walls, the brick floor was coated with grunge, and in January at 10,000 feet above sea level, it was refrigerator-cold, inspiring us to creatively redecorate — moving beds away from windows that leaked wind and rain, and as near to the fireplace as safety permitted. The personable manager, 24-year-old Ulises Santiago, just days away from completing his year of involuntary tourism service, was attentive, though his mind wandered to other things; in a week, he’d be leaving the cloud forest and moving to California, with dreams of making money. “I’ve got a job lined up in a restaurant,” he said optimistically. “Jack in the Box.”

Despite their imperfections, it’s hard to complain too much about such inexpensive lodging in such special destinations. After pointing out multiple minor shortcomings of the cabaña in Apoala, Eduardo Uribe, visiting from Canada, said, “I thought I might stay here a night, but this area is so nice, I’ve already stayed four.”

Correction Appended

THE road to Holbox isn’t an entirely promising one. Our trip to this small Mexican island began much the way my husband and I had been told to expect: with a ride in a dented van that, an hour after leaving the Cancún airport, veered off the main highway and onto a dirt path blocked by two men who collected a small fee from our driver before letting us pass through.

Then the van rumbled along the dirt road before hitting a stretch of pothole-covered pavement. Eventually we arrived at the weather-beaten ferry in the scrappy town of Chiquilá that would take us to Isla Holbox, a spit of land six miles off the northern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula.

Forty minutes later, we encountered a landscape with no high-rises, no chain hotels, no A.T.M.’s, only a handful of cars — with most people darting around on bikes, motor scooters and golf carts — and a dozen or so small hotels within walking distance of the ferry pier.

We were just 93 miles from Cancún, but we felt as though we were light years removed from the huge resorts (and huge crowds) of that popular destination for honeymooners and spring breakers.

“We don’t have any big hotels for big crowds who are looking for all-inclusive offers and parties all day long,” said Manfred Pozvek, who together with his girlfriend, Petra Bara, manages Villas Chimay, an eco-hotel on a tranquil speck of beach on the western end of the island.

The couple, who moved to Holbox (pronounced OHL-bosh) from Switzerland last year after seeing an ad to rent the property in a Swiss newspaper, can switch from French to Spanish to English without a blink and warmly welcome visitors, taking time out from cleaning rooms or other hotel chores to show guests a room and chat about the island.

The trip is “a little bit of an adventure,” Mr. Pozvek said. “But those people who are doing the trip will see that it’s worth it.”

Though the island measures about 25 miles in length, it is less than 2 miles wide at its broadest point, and only a small portion is inhabited. The southern part is made up mostly of mangroves, while the northern shore is all beach. The only town is a collection of colorfully painted one- and two-story concrete structures on a grid of about a dozen blocks. Even in town, the roads are made of packed white sand.

About 2,000 people live on the island, working mostly as fishermen or in the tourism trade. On the beach near town, pedestrians must tread carefully, stepping over boat tethers and rolled up fishing nets. In the late afternoon, pushy pelicans and seagulls congregate around fishing boats anchored just offshore, poised to gobble up any scraps that the fishermen discard as they gut and clean the day’s catch.

Whale sharks, the largest of all fish, migrate to the waters off the coast of Holbox from June through September and have become big business as the focus of an increasingly popular day trip from Cancún. For about 800 pesos (about $73 at 11 pesos to the dollar), tour operators offer the chance to swim with the spotted giants, which can grow to 40 feet long and are said to be gentle.

There were no whale sharks to be seen at the end of January, when my husband, Greg, and I visited the island, but there were plenty of nature tours to nearby cays, kayaking tours through mangroves and boat tours to Isla de los Pájaros, or Island of Birds, where pelicans, frigates and various migratory birds roost.

The island is pancake flat with scrubby vegetation. At low tide, the receding waters reveal tide pools and ripples in the wet sand. Sandbars emerge like a mirage, a haze blurring the outlines of pelicans and other seafaring birds that congregate on the temporary islets. In January, the potent smell of seaweed wafted up occasionally, but mosquitoes, which we were warned of and prepared for with DEET and citronella candles, were scarce.

Holbox, which means black hole in the Maya language, is said to have been named after a dark lagoon in the southern part of the island. And locals say the Maya considered a freshwater lagoon, Yalahau, about a 20-minute boat ride from the island, to be a sacred fountain of youth.

In October 2005, Hurricane Wilma devastated Holbox, and though the island has largely recovered, evidence of the destruction still remains in spots. A stroll or golf cart ride along the beach takes you past several hotels, some set back farther than others. Nearly all are made with thatched roofs and are no more than two or three stories high. Villas Flamingos, one of the farthest from town on the eastern side of the island, sits next to the skeleton of the former Hotel Pelicano, its first story largely washed away in the storm. Foot-long iguanas now sun themselves on the broken-tile floor.

On a breezy afternoon in late January, visitors would find the central square mostly deserted, making the rusted stop signs at each corner seem silly. But around 7 p.m., when the restaurants opened for dinner, a steady stream of golf carts and scooters — many piloted by children and carrying more people than they were designed for — brought the plaza to life and gave meaning to the stop signs.

Local children frolicked on the jungle gym of a new playground in the center of town while adults gathered around the edges to chat. And tourists, most of them European, dined on the catch of the day at the various restaurants around the square.

By general consensus, the best restaurant on the island is at Casa Sandra hotel, where diners sip mojitos by candlelight and the Cuban chef visits each table to describe the specials. (Be sure to try Grandma’s meatballs for 125 pesos.) Sandra Pérez Lozano, Casa Sandra’s owner and a writer, came to Holbox looking for solitude close to nature and in 1999 built her two-story thatched-roof hotel with a full-length front porch and a second-story terrace to take in the ocean.

But the future of the island, she later wrote in an e-mail message, is difficult to predict. “Although we want it to remain in silence,” she wrote, in Spanish, “the money and the hotel industry in this region are very powerful and could end this secret wonder of the Caribbean.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

If you are traveling from Cancún by car, take Route 180 toward Mérida to Nuevo Xcan. At the crossroads, take the road to the port at Chiquilá, passing by El Cedral, Kantunilkin and Solferino. The trip takes two to two and a half hours. A taxi from Cancún runs about 700 pesos (about $64 at 11 pesos to the dollar). At Chiquilá, you can catch a “fast ferry” to the island for 40 pesos a person, which takes 20 minutes, or a slow ferry (40 minutes) for 20 pesos. Any hotel can give you departure times, and most will arrange a transfer from Cancún to Holbox for about $130 a person round trip, including ferry. Aerosaab (52 984-873-0804; www.aerosaab.com) offers flights to Holbox from Cancún for $590 for up to five passengers.

WHERE TO STAY

Villas Chimay (52-984-875-2220; www.holbox.info) is a five-room eco-resort with a solar and wind energy system. Rooms, with composting toilets and no air-conditioning, start at $50 a night.

Villas Paraiso del Mar (52-984-875-2062; www.holbox-island.com) offers 36 suites. Junior suites with air-conditioning and TVs start at $135 a night.

Xaloc Resort (52-984-875-2160; www.holbox-xalocresort.com) has 18 bungalows, not air-conditioned, from $90.

WHERE TO EAT

Casa Sandra (52-984-875-2171, www.casasandra.com) offers Cuban and Thai-influenced cuisine. For lunch, try the lobster pizza for 300 pesos at Edelin Restaurant (52-984-875-2024) on the town square. The restaurant at Hotel Faro Viejo (52-984-875-2217; www.faroviejoholbox.com.mx) offers good food by the beach; seafood tacos are 550 pesos.

WHAT TO BRING

Cash. There is no bank or A.T.M. on the island. American Express traveler’s checks can be changed at most hotels. A flashlight is handy for nighttime walks.

CLAD in black clothes and moonlight, our guide Poncho adjusted his ski mask and faced us to speak. The desert has claimed many lives, he said, but tonight we would make it across the border.

The night was crisp and clear in the central Mexican highlands, the moon illuminating mesquite trees, cactus and pastures. Our group of 13 was about to set out on one of Mexico’s more bizarre tourist attractions: a make-believe trip illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States.

“Where are you going to, my friends?” Poncho asked the people clustered around him.

“To Texas,” a skinny Mexican teenager replied.

“And you?” he asked another man.

“California.”

The four-hour caminata nocturna — nighttime hike — traverses desert, hills, brambles and riverbeds in the Parque EcoAlberto, an eco-park communally owned by the Hñahñu Indians who live on some 3,000 acres of land in the state of Hidalgo, about three hours northwest of Mexico City (and roughly 700 miles from the border).

Organizers say they opened the park about two and a half years ago, with financing from the Mexican government, and began the caminata as a way to offer tourists a taste of life as an illegal immigrant.

The Hñahñus are people who know something about that life. Of the approximately 2,200 Hñahñus from this area, 700 live in Mexico and 1,500 live “on the other side” — mostly in Las Vegas and other parts of Nevada, where they install drywall, drive trucks or work on farms, residents say. Many of the tour guides here have crossed the real border several times.

“Being an immigrant isn’t a source of pride,” said Poncho, whose real name is Alfonso Martinez. “We abandon the family, the language, the earth. We lose our sense of community. The idea here is to raise people’s consciousness about what immigrants go through.”

Of course, compared with actually crossing the border, the caminata is as watered down as an airport cocktail. The guides don’t desert their groups, and the most danger visitors face is twisting an ankle or walking into a low-hanging tree branch.

The idea of tourists’ aping illegal immigrants can seem crass, like Marie Antoinette playing peasant on the grounds of Versailles. But the guides describe the caminata as an homage to the path immigrants have beaten across the border. And the park’s approach to consciousness-raising is novel, but not completely unique. In 2000, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders set up a camp of tents, medical stations and latrines in Central Park to recreate the setting of a refugee camp. Last year, the refugee-camp project returned to New York and also traveled to Atlanta and Nashville.

Park guides say about 3,000 tourists — mostly Mexican — have hiked the caminata since it began in July 2004. It costs 200 pesos (about $18 at 11 pesos to the dollar), and tourists who want to stick around at the park can also go river-rafting, rappel down a cliff and sleep in cabins with roofs of maguey leaves. But guides say the mock border-crossing is the park’s main draw.

“Of course it’s just a game, where you’re always safe and where there are no real fights,” said Antonio Flores, a sociology professor from Querétaro, in central Mexico, who hiked the caminata in November with a group of students. “It was very interesting, very important. Often, immigration is a subject so far away. This gave us a chance to experience it through our own steps.”

My group’s hike began outside a white stucco church, where we huddled around Poncho and another masked guide, Luís Santiago. About 10 Hñahñus accompanied us on the walk, playing the role of fellow immigrants. The men explained they were heading north to look for work. A woman carrying a 2-year-old girl slung in a shawl said she was seeking her boyfriend.

After unfurling the Mexican flag and singing the national anthem, the guides organized us, telling us to walk in a file, strongest in back, weakest and slowest in front.

“In the night, everyone is equal,” Poncho said. “Here, everyone wins, not just the fastest or smartest. If we make it, we all make it; if they catch one, they catch us all.”

They advised us to be brave, to remember our ancestors and to hit the ground if we heard gunshots.

We’d been walking down a gravel road for 10 minutes when people started shouting and tearing off into the dark. “Vamos rápido!” they shouted. “Vamos corriendo! Hasta el puente! Apúrense!” (“Let’s get moving! To the bridge! Get going!”) Behind us, headlights and the police drew nearer.

“Run!” Mr. Santiago shouted, frantically directing us toward a concrete bridge at the bottom of the sloping road. “Shut off that light, they’re coming. Fast, fast. Damn it, shut off that light!”

Sirens whooped. We scrambled down a hill of loose dirt, tripping and stumbling over rocks and gouges in the ground. We ended up in a mire along the Tula River, ankle-deep in mud and water.

A 5-year-old boy known as El Relleno showed up and guided us through the brush.

“Come on, this way,” he said, jumping around moonlit puddles.

Poncho shooed us into a thicket of bush. We’d nearly been discovered by the Border Patrol. We hid as men with flashlights roamed the field in front of us, taunting us in Spanish and accented English.

“Come here, guys,” they said. “Ya sé que están escondidos. We know you’re hiding. We’re going to send you back to Mexico.”

“Escuchen!” said another, telling us to listen up. “No van a cruzar el rio. You’re not going to get across the river.”

Suddenly, someone from our group darted from the bushes and past the guards.

“Stop! Stop!” yelled the guards, and fired a half-dozen shots (blanks, of course). “Where you running, huh?”

About 70 Hñahñus make part of their living as guides, guards or fellow immigrants on the hike. One of them, Purificación Álvarez, said that visitors often walked away stunned.

“They learn to value the liberty they have in their own countries, that they don’t have to run and be chased in their own lives,” she said.

When the smell of gunfire dissipated, we sneaked away, crossing cornfields, passing drowsy mules and slipping under barbed-wire fences. Brown moths darted in and out of the flashlight beams, and the guides philosophized about the significance of the hike, the empathy it aims to teach.

At one point, we paused at the river’s edge, where Mr. Santiago told us to cast a stone into the water to symbolically expel evil spirits. We did, and then Poncho pointed up at the night sky.

WHEN you walk across the border from the United States to Mexico and the steel revolving doors clank behind you, locking you in, there they are — the pharmacists in their crisp white coats offering you discount drugs on the street, as if they were Sno-Kones, not bottles of pills, and the junk taxis making their rush at your pedestrian confusion. The Avenida Revolución stretches ahead like a psychedelic version of Disneyland’s Main Street, with its multiplex margarita bars and outdoor party music and throngs of San Diego teenagers enjoying a day’s parole from being under 21.

Everything you expected to see, you see, and you think you know Tijuana.

But a few blocks from Revolución is the Centro Cultural Tijuana, a monumental arts complex with a planetarium centerpiece, a recently opened a native-plants and pre-Columbian sculpture garden, and a new gallery and performance space under construction. Down the Boulevard Sanchéz Taboada is La Querencia, a five-month-old restaurant that is the tip of the iceberg of Tijuana’s new Baja cuisine movement, which now includes more than 20 chefs and a new culinary academy.

And the city keeps surprising as you go: the Emporio, a boutique hotel with enough Corbusier settees, blond plywood and pedestal candles in the lobby to satisfy any denizen of South Beach; Tabule, a martini lounge with a throbbing dining room and a mobbed marble bar; and techno clubs and art bars and magic-realism cabarets and derelict Art Deco hip-hop theaters.

“People think we have nothing,” Miguel Ángél Guerrero Yaguës, the chef and owner of La Querencia, says of Tijuana. Mr. Guerrero Yaguës, a sportsman, serves things like boar tacos and scallop ceviche, what he calls Baja Med, or Mexican, Mediterranean and whatever, combinations that seem emblematic of Tijuana’s new sense of urban experiment. He opened a pizza place a few weeks ago, with pies topped with local ingredients like manta ray.

“We have everything,” he says, standing in La Querencia’s dining room, a stylish loftlike space with concrete floors, lacquered steel dining tables and two open kitchens. Patrons dressed California-casually in linens and leather sandals, with cellphones and balloon wine glasses at the ready, crowd the restaurant, creating a happy noontime buzz. “We have two seas, the Pacific and the Sea of Cortez,” Mr. Guerrero Yaguës says. “California only has one.”

This is a Tijuana you don’t know. Most Mexicans, who don’t cut Tijuana much slack — dismissing it as a provincial backwater, a border badlands — don’t know it either.

But Tijuana is Mexico’s fastest-growing city (a population of 750,000 in 1990, 1.2 million in 2000 and projected to be 2.2 million by 2010). And it is changing. Cosmopolitan by default because of its proximity to the United States — 60 million people cross the border there each year — Tijuana is developing a new identity that is bringing it out of the shadows of its own reputation. Its fabled lawlessness has become a kind of freedom and license for social mobility and entrepreneurship that has attracted artists and musicians, chefs and restaurateurs, and professionals from Mexico and elsewhere. (The United States Consulate acknowledges that public safety continues to be an issue because of drug-related crimes and kidnappings, though Americans have not typically been the targets of these crimes. The consulate advises travelers to carry photo identification at all times.)

IN several trips to Tijuana last month, I discovered a city that was excited about itself and the turn it was taking, and newly proud of what has always made it Tijuana, like the taquerias and the tortas stands. Taco makers like Javier Campos Guttiérez at Tacos Salceados (Tijuanans call it La Ermita, after its address) are becoming stars. The night I ate there, sitting at the counter, people pushing at my back (including Ana Laura Martínez Gardoqui, the director of the cooking school), the last plate Mr. Campos Guttiérez sent out was a shrimp-and-strawberry taco that was a play on words as well as tastes. “Fresa,” or Spanish for strawberry, is also slang for “young, hip and chic.”

“You can see the cultural development of the city growing with the city,” says Adelaida del Real, who operates El Lugar del Nopal. “So many artists have moved here, who want to show here or sing here.”

El Lugar del Nopal is a cafe, bar, restaurant and cabaret on a small residential street in Centro, or downtown Tijuana, behind an inconspicuous wooden door that you might have found by following a cat that wandered through it. Inside, Nopal is like being inside someone’s dream life, set in someone’s living room, with a stage at one end. There are carved and painted masks on the walls from various regions of Mexico, fierce and folkloric, that Ms. del Real’s partner, José Pastor, collects and that make Nopal’s ramble of rooms a bit of a spirit world. Outside, a terrace roofed by tall trees and vines sits above a colony of casitas that jazz musicians, making the stop in the 60’s, when Tijuana was on the circuit, stayed in.

Ms. del Real and I talk at a table as patrons take the air, drink, browse through alternative newspapers like Tijuana Metro and Arte de Vivir and generally imbibe Nopal’s atmosphere of wise repose.

IN the late summer of 1880, Susan and Oliver Ward traveled by steamship to Veracruz, Mexico. They then boarded a train and finally a stagecoach, heading 450 miles inland to the state of Michoacán. Along the way, the couple passed through towns and cities that had been built soon after the Spanish conquest — with tiled domes, terraced roofs and bell towers that looked as if they might have been exported whole from Seville.

To Susan, a writer and illustrator who had been living, not so happily, in mining settlements of American West, Mexico looked “like something rubbed up out of a lamp, as different from the false fronts, cowhide boots, flapping vests and harsh disappointments of Leadville as anything could possibly have been.”

“Oh!” she told her husband on the night they finally arrived at the Hotel Michoacán, “I have never been anywhere till now!”

The scene is from “Angle of Repose,” Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, which is set mostly in American mining towns and on the banks of Idaho’s Boise River. Mainly, the novel — winner of the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for fiction — is an epic tale of frontier life, the story of a long marriage, challenged by disappointment and lost hope and wounded by betrayal and compromise.

But halfway through, in one thin chapter in the very center, Mr. Stegner offers this sunny interlude in Mexico, where Oliver Ward, an engineer, has been sent to inspect an old silver mine. Susan Ward makes the most of the trip — and treasures its memory the rest of her life. “Mexico,” she tells her grandson decades later, “was my Paris and my Rome.”

Paris and Rome: not usually what Americans imagine when they think of Mexico. Yet Susan’s impressions are as sharply detailed as a photograph.

That is in part because Mr. Stegner did not entirely make them up. His Susan Burling Ward was closely modeled after a real American writer and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote, also married to a mining engineer, who published her impressions of traveling to Michoacán in 1881. Mr. Stegner unabashedly borrowed Mrs. Foote’s experiences and impressions — but rendered them in his own artful prose and placed them in the context of the Wards’ complicated marriage.

The result is a travelogue so romantic and full of enthusiasm, it recommends a trip to Mexico’s colonial interior. This past spring, using both “Angle of Repose” and Mary Foote’s reminiscences as a guide, I traveled in the 19th-century women’s footsteps.

I had seen other parts of Mexico that Americans more often see: the beach towns of the west coast and Baha, teeming Mexico City, even a few of the better-known colonial cities like San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato. But I had never heard of Morelia — the little stone capital of Michoacán, high in a mountain valley — or known anyone who had traveled there.

Passenger trains no longer run from Veracruz to Mexico City, but I and my 16-year-old son (and translator) found a luxurious alternative in the form of the UNO bus line. The five-and-a-half-hour journey lifts you from sea level to Mexico City (7,300 feet) on a road that provides, as Susan Ward’s train window must have provided her, a leisurely look at the snowcapped Pico de Orizaba, Mexico’s highest mountain.

The Wards’ stagecoach gave Susan ample chance to observe and sketch the architecture and the people. “She had a heart as well as an eye,” Mr. Stegner wrote, “and they were sometimes at war. Patient Indian women with their babies slung in rebozos, men bowed under their burdens, looked to her like people waiting for their souls. A cathedral rising out of a huddle of huts … made her ashamed of the delight she took in a picturesqueness created out of so much driven human labor.”

Susan notices, and admires, every detail. “Even the way an Indian woman hands you a tortilla on her flat palm is like a movement in a dance,” she tells her husband.

Our taxi from the bus station, like the Wards’ coach, took us past Morelia’s forested city park, alongside the soaring antique aqueduct and into the stone-paved city center. There, we settled into the Hotel de la Soledad, a 250-year-old Spanish inn made of the same pink stone used in all the streets and buildings of Morelia. And in the morning, I went in search of Casa Walkenhorst (Casa Gravenhorst in Mrs. Foote’s account), the great house in the center of the city where Susan was a guest for all but the first night of her stay in Morelia.

Neither description of the trip, fiction nor nonfiction, identifies the house, except to say that the couple’s bedroom looked down on the Plaza of the Martyrs, Morelia’s central square. I could see only one structure, now offices, that might have been the house — fronted by a row of nine arches. The double doors to the courtyard were open that morning, so I could see the half-dozen shiny cars parked inside.

THE sun was setting above Costa Careyes, a luxury development on the Pacific coast of Mexico, and as it lowered into the foam-capped sea, its light was refracted through a massive, puzzling structure on the dunes that looked like Freddy Kruger’s knifelike finger nails.

The out-there creation — actually the beginnings of a giant sculpture of an upturned hand — was that of Gian Franco Brignone, the eccentric Italian-born financier and artist who founded this exclusive beach community in the late 1960’s. He had invited two dozen or so guests, who now stood obediently with their margaritas on his terrace, to watch the quasi-spiritual spectacle.

“Say goodbye!” ordered Mr. Brignone, 80, waving a carved tree branch and wearing a long caftan. “Say goodbye to the sun.”

Such was a typical early evening cocktail hour in Careyes, well known among jet-set internationals and fashion-world inhabitants but hardly, it seems, by anyone else. Which, of course, is the point for frequenters like Giorgio Armani, Francis Ford Coppola, Uma Thurman and Heidi Klum and Seal, who own a villa here.

A laid-back, word-of-mouth alternative to hard-charging party spots like St.-Tropez or Punta del Este, Careyes is small (there are only 42 villas, 40 casitas and one hotel — El Careyes Beach Resort) and conspicuous consumption is considered déclassé. There is no marina for yacht envy, nor an airstrip, and not only are there no designer boutiques and glitzy nightclubs, there’s not even a town.

The crowd here tends to be young, or young at heart, wealthy and on the make. During the Christmas-to-Easter polo season — yes, there’s an up-to-date polo facility, a big draw for European and South American playboy types — lavish dinner and cocktail parties unfold in the villas, which rent for up to $6,000 a night for their infinity pools, sprawling thatched roofs and open-air living areas with steep cliff-side views instead of doors or windows.

The parties often stretch into the wee hours, with well-dressed revelers plunging into the pools, hot tubs or the silk-textured ocean. (The mysterious invitations to these late-night gatherings arrive via the house managers who do double duty as blue-chip social connectors.) As at a surrealist country club, after several nights of these boozy fetes you still have no idea what these people do in the real world, and it’s considered bad form, after all, to make such direct inquiries. Which was why when I visited last January, I kept racing to the computer at my hotel’s business center to Google my new best friends. If only the Internet had existed during Gatsby’s time!

“Careyes draws a very affluent international crowd, but they are more attuned to aesthetics then status,” said Tim Parsa, a businessman and writer in his 30’s who lives in Mexico City and Manhattan and goes to Careyes for the polo. He was perched in a shaded corner of the beach typing a screenplay on a laptop one recent morning. “Here people aren’t overwrought with that aggressive pursuit of a good time,” he added.

Mr. Brignone developed Careyes as a leisure-class utopia where social standing would be measured by eccentricity and caftans, not big yachts and golf courses. He discovered the eight-mile stretch of land on a tip from a friend, Antenor Patino, the Bolivian tin baron who developed Las Hadas, the luxury resort featured in the movie “10.” Mr. Brignone commissioned architects like Marco Aldaco and Diego Villasenor to build a handful of brightly painted, whimsical Mexican-Mediterranean-style bungalows. One villa, Casa Mi Ojo, in homage to Mr. Brignone’s missing left eye, has a hanging bridge suspended 90 feet above the ocean that leads to a little island and a huge eye carved into the side wall with a pupil that doubles as a peephole window.

Mr. Brignone’s well-heeled European friends, including the Fiat scion Gianni Agnelli, Egon Von Furstenberg and the billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith came to visit, and soon the word spread.

(Sir James bought land down the coast in the mid-1980’s and set up his own private Xanadu called Cuixmala for his extended clan and guests, who included Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan. He died in 1997, and Cuixmala is now run by his daughter, Alix Marcaccini, as a 32,473-acre biosphere reserve and an exclusive estate-and-breakfast, where guests like Madonna and Mick Jagger rent out the apocalypse-proof Indian-themed palace, La Loma, for $9,000 to $15,000 a night.)

A few more villas have been added at Careyes over the years, but you still rarely see another car or person on the cobblestone streets that laze past the lushly planted mansionesque villas with names like Parasol and Candelabro. Strolling on the beach one warm starlit night, my traveling companion and I happened upon a dinner given by Ms. Marcaccini. A long table for 40 lighted by torches and sprinkled with bougainvillea and copa de oro had been set up on the main beach by the charming pink and thatched Italian restaurant that’s the nexus of the social scene. Both beach and restaurant are named Playa Rosa

The guests, a whirl of slender shoulders draped in shawls, clinked glasses of red wine and margaritas in a scene that could easily have been airlifted in from a fashion show afterparty in New York or London. They included the model Jacquetta Wheeler, the English fashion designer Alice Temperly, the actress Minnie Driver and the actor Danny Huston.

“Celebrities like it here because it’s private, and there’s no paparazzi,” said Viviana Dean, who manages several of the villas. “People looking for a glitzy, loud vacation tend not to want to come here anyway. ”

During the day the best eye candy is at the Playa Rosa beach, which plays out like a jet-set version of “Gilligan’s Island.” Just-rolled-out-of-bed guests begin to show up around noon and lounge on the straw mats strewn about on a lush green lawn shaded by big stately palms. Sun chairs, umbrellas and jet skis are not allowed by Mr. Brignone. I didn’t see a single pair of designer sunglasses or logo beach totes. Instead the statement tended toward a label-free array of exotic muumuus and wraps that looked like they were from far-flung medinas and bazaars.

At lunchtime, groups slipping into and out of English, French, Spanish and Italian pulled up to tables under a shaded patio at the restaurant and ordered delicate salads, ceviche and half portions of risotto. The very rich often don’t carry cash so the restaurant’s manager, Augusto, is always forgiving bottles of Pellegrino and margaritas, especially for bikinied women.

There are several little rocky islands that are close enough to the beach to swim to. We were told that one had a human nest built by the Sky Cries Mary singer-turned-sculptor Roderick Romero, who fashions elaborate tree houses for clients who have included Donna Karan and Sting. We decided to swim out, but as we made our way through the clear warm water, we were intercepted midway by some handsome men in a Zodiac outboard who invited us for drinks and backgammon aboard their boat followed by a helicopter ride over the area.

After a few days, we had stopped being surprised by such idyllic social encounters. It was just another day as usual in Careyes.