🚴 Cycling early morning, best routes around the city?

I started cycling at 5.30 in the morning about 2 months ago. Needed some exercise before work. The roads are empty at that hour, and you can hear birds, which I never expected. By 8 the traffic is so heavy I wouldn't dare ride a cycle anywhere near it. Right now I just do the same loop near my house, 6 kilometres, over and over. It's getting boring and my legs want more. A colleague told me about a route near a big park. He says there's very little traffic there even after sunrise and a few shady stretches on the way. I haven't tried it yet because I don't know the roads and don't want to get lost. Also my cycle is an ordinary one, nothing fancy, with a squeaky seat I keep ignoring. The city feels different at that hour. Tea vendors setting up their stalls, old men walking in groups. A milk delivery guy on a scooter waved at me last week and I felt famous. Everything smells of wet roads and fresh bread. By 7 it all disappears behind the noise. That's why I keep waking up early, not the exercise part. Safety matters too. I stay on well lit roads with some people around, even if it's longer. I carry water, a small light on the cycle and my phone with the location shared. So, which early morning routes would you suggest? Preferably around 10 to 20 kilometres, shaded if possible, with a decent road surface and no big junctions where trucks come through.

Found a longer loop through the old cantonment area recently that stays shaded almost the entire way through, considerably cooler than my usual route even by seven in the morning during the worst of the summer months here. Worth the slightly longer detour purely for not arriving at work already fully drenched in sweat before the actual day even starts properly, week after week.

Cycling before six along the lake road here beats any gym session for clearing my head completely, empty quiet roads and just enough soft morning light to see properly without heavy traffic making everything unpleasant the way it always does even one single hour later on that exact same familiar stretch most weekday mornings all through this year so far.