My advice is to start early. I didn’t get the first bus, but was on the 0900 one. You take the metro to the Autobuses del Norte metro station. The pyramid bus tickets could be bought near Puerta (door) 8. There are signs with the Teotihuacan pyramids. Buy a round trip, and make sure you don’t miss your departing bus. The ticket is only valid for that one. I think it cost 100 pesos or so. Ask which bay the bus will be in, I found the signage lacking. https://sightdoing.net/how-to-visit-teotihuacan-without-a-tour/

The trip isn’t quick. Bring a book or something to do. It’s a good idea to bring water too. I visited in the middle of November and got sunburnt standing on the pyramids for most of the day.

The gatehouse is a short walk to the front entrance. Tickets are 70 pesos.  Once inside you should head straight up the Pyramide del Sol by turning left (Note: I have read that you are unable to climb the Pyramid of the Sun now). The steep steps in the high altitude might be more difficult than you expect. Be aware that people will all want their photos taken and the selfie sticks will be out on top. So long as you arrive early enough, the tours won’t be filing the area, so enjoy the peace. From there I went directly to the Piramide de la Luna. You can only walk half way up, and this is also steep. But the views are special in their own right.

After these two important stops, I spent hours walking around the ruins. Explore the Palace of Quetzlpapalotl. Read all the placards, discover all the hidden paintings of jaguars and then walk down to Templo de Quetzalcóatl before leaving. The temple is easy to miss, but worth the few minutes walk over for the carvings.

Look out for the hawkers. Some of the jaguar whistles and silver items are decently priced, but barter them down as much as you can. The obsidian statues of the pyramids are of varying quality. I personally purchased a whistle as I liked the paint scheme. But I saw many of these items for sale at the market Mercado de artesanias/la Ciudadela (especially the pyramids).

Next to the Palacio de Quetzalpapálotl are some stores where you can buy water and really delicious ice cream (strawberries and cream, lemon and chilli).

I spent a good 5 hours at the site. i took a lot of photos and even spotted a few crevice swift lizards.

My bus trip back left from almost the same location that I was dropped off at. I didn’t have to cross any roads.

Excerpts from “Fingerprints of the Gods” by Graham Hancock (Chapter 22) that I found fascinating:

“What Harleston’s investigations had shown was that a complex mathematical relationship appeared to exist among the principal structures lined up along the Street of the Dead (and indeed beyond it). This relationship suggested something extraordinary, namely that Teotihuacan might originally have been designed as a precise scale-model of the solar system. At any rate, if the centre line of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl were taken as denoting the position of the sun, markers laid out northwards from it along the axis of the Street of the Dead seemed to indicate the correct orbital distances of the inner planets, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn (represented by the so-called ‘Sun’ Pyramid), Uranus (by the ‘Moon’ Pyramid), and Neptune and Pluto by as yet unexcavated mounds some kilometres farther north.

If these correlations were more than coincidental, then, at the very least, they indicated the presence at Teotihuacan of an advanced observational astronomy, one not surpassed by modern science until a relatively late date. Uranus remained unknown to our own astronomers until 1787, Neptune until 1846 and Pluto until 1930. Even the most conservative estimate of Teotihuacan’s antiquity, by contrast, suggested that the principal ingredients of the site-plan (including the Citadel, the Street of the Dead and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon) must date back at least to the time of Christ. No known civilization of that epoch, either in the Old World or in the New, is supposed to have had any knowledge at all of the outer planets – let alone to have possessed accurate information concerning their orbital distances from each other and from the sun.”

“There was no archaeological evidence that this enormous enclosure had ever served as a citadel – or, for that matter, that it had any kind of military or defensive function at all. Like so much else about Teotihuacan it had clearly been planned with painstaking care, and executed with enormous effort, but its true purpose remained unidentified by modern scholarship.28 Even the Aztecs, who had been responsible for naming the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon (an attribution which had stuck though no one had any idea what the original builders had called them) had failed to invent a name for the Citadel. It had been left to the Spaniards to label it as they did – an understandable conceit since the 36-acre central patio of La Ciudadela was surrounded by massively thick embankments more than 23 feet high and some 1500 feet long on each side.”

“My walk had now brought me to the western extreme of the patio. I climbed a steep set of stairs that led to the top of the embankment and turned north on to the Street of the Dead. Once again I had to remind myself that this was almost certainly not what the Teotihuacanos (whoever they were) had called the immense and impressive avenue. The Spanish name Calle de los Muertos was of Aztec origin, apparently based on speculation that the numerous mounds on either side of the Street were graves (which, as it happened, they were not).

As I walked steadily northward towards the still-distant Moon Pyramid, it seemed to me that this theory had several points in its favour. For a start the ‘Street’ was blocked at regular intervals by high partition walls, at the foot of which the remains of well-made sluices could clearly be seen. Moreover, the lie of the land would have facilitated a north-south hydraulic flow since the base of the Moon Pyramid stood on ground that was approximately 100 feet higher than the area in front of the Citadel. The partitioned sections could easily have been filled with water and might indeed have served as reflecting pools, creating a spectacle far more dramatic than those offered by the Taj Mahal or the fabled Shalimar Gardens. Finally, the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (financed by the National Science Foundation in Washington DC and led by Professor Rene Millon of the University of Rochester) had demonstrated conclusively that the ancient city had possessed ‘many carefully laid-out canals and systems of branching waterways, artificially dredged into straightened portions of a river, which formed a network within Teotihuacan and ran all the way to [Lake Texcoco], now ten miles distant but perhaps closer in antiquity’.”