The day starts in the dark. My driver collected me from Condesa just before half past five, and an hour later we were rolling into a launch field northeast of the city, the sky going from ink to peach while the crew poured coffee and passed around pan dulce. Teotihuacán is only about 40 kilometers from Mexico City, but at that hour it feels like another world.

Then the balloons come to life. The crew lays the envelopes out across the dewy grass and fills them with huge fans until they rise, one by one, like something breathing. Ours was named Quetzalcóatl (of course it was), and once she was standing she was ten stories tall. Wear something you can climb in, by the way: you step up into the wicker basket using little footholds, and there’s a small, giddy moment of faith before you’re in.

And then you’re simply up. No jolt, no sway, barely a sensation of moving at all. Just the hiss of the burner now and then, and the ground falling quietly away. I’d had butterflies the night before. They lasted about four seconds.

For forty-five minutes we drifted over the valley as the first light came over the hills. Our pilot, Miguel, dipped us low toward the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, then lifted us back up to ride alongside a whole river of other balloons, every color you can imagine, all floating the same slow way. From up there you finally understand the scale of the place: the long straight line of the Avenue of the Dead, the geometry of it all, laid out nearly two thousand years ago.

It’s worth knowing what you’re floating over. At its height, Teotihuacán was the largest city in the Americas, and the Pyramid of the Sun was finished by around 100 CE. The Aztecs found it centuries after it had emptied out and gave it the name it still carries: the place where the gods were born. Watching the sun come up over it, that felt exactly right. I flew the day before the solar eclipse, which only added to the feeling that the sky was putting on a show.