Mexico City is a lot of things at once: enormous, high, noisy, beautiful, tiring, and endlessly generous. About twenty million people live in its metropolitan area, at an altitude of roughly 2,240 metres, in a basin ringed by volcanoes that rarely show themselves through the haze. It stands on the bed of an old lake, and on that lake the Mexica built Tenochtitlan in the fourteenth century, a city of canals and causeways that astonished the Spanish when they arrived in 1519.
The past lies directly under the present. The ruins of the Templo Mayor, the Aztec main temple, were found in 1978 beside the cathedral on the Zócalo, which is the huge central square, and the cathedral itself, begun in 1573, leans a little as it sinks into the soft ground. The city has been shaken by earthquakes, notably in 1985 and 2017, and many buildings show repairs. Museums are among the world's finest, including the Anthropology Museum in Chapultepec Park, with its Aztec sun stone and the Maya halls.
For a rider, the capital is better entered by plan than by improvisation. Traffic is dense, lanes are fluid, and motorcycles filter through, so stay alert for buses, taxis and potholes, and avoid rush hours. Several roads have driving restrictions based on number plates on days of heavy pollution, so check the rules if you are in a foreign vehicle. Mountain roads in the surrounding highlands, toward Toluca, Cuernavaca or Puebla, climb to cool, pine-covered passes with good curves.
Fuel is abundant, and food is endless: tacos al pastor cut from a spit, tamales for breakfast, mole, and street stalls with fresh fruit. The altitude takes a day to get used to, and a sudden afternoon storm in the rainy season, from June to September, arrives with hail. The old college of San Francisco Javier, at Tepotzotlan, on the northern outskirts, with its golden baroque church, is a treat beyond the city's edge.