Coffee at dawn in Istanbul.

The flight landed at four in the morning, which I had booked by accident and have since booked on purpose eleven times. By five I was on a stone balcony above the Bosphorus with a cup of coffee, a borrowed blanket, and a city that had not yet decided to wake up.

I have seen Istanbul in the middle of the day. It is magnificent and it is a lot. What I did not know until that mistimed arrival is that most great cities keep a private hour, and they will give it to anyone willing to be awake for it.

The hour before

First the gulls. Then a ferry somewhere out of sight, sounding its horn across flat water. Then the call to prayer, beginning at one minaret and taken up by another and another until the whole city is holding a single overlapping note. Then, very gradually, the smell of bread.

Nobody was performing anything. No one was selling me a carpet or a boat trip or an experience. The city was simply doing what it does at that hour, and I happened to be there.

Why I now plan for it

I have traveled long enough to have opinions about efficiency, and this is the least efficient thing I do. I lose a morning to it. I am tired by two in the afternoon. And it is, without competition, the thing I remember about a place ten years later.

So it has become a method. On the first full morning somewhere new I set an alarm for an hour before sunrise, and I go and sit somewhere with a view and nothing to do. No camera out. No plan for the day yet. Just the place, before it puts its face on.

You cannot be sold a city you have already met at five in the morning.

What it changes

Practically, it resets the clock. Jet lag loses most of its power over a woman who has already watched a sunrise. But the real change is in posture. By the time the shops open I am not a visitor arriving with a list. I have already had the best part of the day, and everything after it is a bonus rather than a requirement.

It also makes me generous. There is very little to be irritated by at that hour, and something about starting there carries through the rest of the trip. I negotiate more kindly. I say yes more often. I stop needing the day to go a particular way.

How to do it

• Choose the view the night before, and walk to it once in daylight so you know the way.
• Ask your hotel for a thermos, or find the one bakery already open. There always is one.
• Take a shawl. It is colder than you think, everywhere, at that hour.
• Leave the phone in your pocket for the first twenty minutes. The photograph will still be there. The feeling will not.
• Go back to bed afterwards if you like. That is not cheating; that is the luxury.

I still have the notebook from that first morning. The entry is four lines long and one of them is just the word gulls. It is enough. I can put myself back on that balcony instantly, which is more than I can say for most of the days I planned carefully.