Elephantine Island
"An island in a river in a desert — the logic of location here stacks up like a Russian doll."
The public ferry to Elephantine Island runs all day and costs almost nothing — a flat-bottomed boat with benches along the sides that fills with islanders returning from the market, sometimes a goat, sacks of vegetables wedged under the seats. The crossing takes four minutes. On the other side the city of Aswan disappears completely: no traffic, no cruise ship queues, no merchants calling after you in languages they have estimated are your own. The island has two villages — Siou and Khonou — connected by paths narrow enough that two people cannot walk abreast, the walls on either side painted in deep ochre and turquoise and a pink that in the afternoon light becomes almost incandescent.
Elephantine has been inhabited continuously for at least five thousand years — the ancient Egyptians knew it as Abu, the city of elephants, a trading post where caravans from sub-Saharan Africa arrived with ivory and gold and ebony. The ruins of the ancient city occupy the southern tip of the island: a Khnum temple, a nilometer carved into the granite to measure the annual flood, and layer upon layer of mud-brick walls from different periods built directly on top of each other in a stratigraphy that archaeologists are still untangling. I walked through the ruins alone in the early morning, the only other person present being a man raking the path, and found a section of wall where three thousand years of continuous occupation had compressed into a cross-section no deeper than my arm.
The Nubian families who live on the island run guesthouses in houses that smell of incense and are decorated with photographs, crocodile skins, and the kind of clutter that accumulates when a family has inhabited the same rooms for generations. Several keep live crocodiles in rooftop pools — descendants of the sacred animals from the ancient Sobek cult, or so the story goes, fed on chicken and presented to curious guests for a small fee. I visited one. The crocodile was small and looked deeply uninterested in the theological significance of its own lineage.
In the evenings the island becomes purely local. I sat outside a small café run by a woman who brought tea without asking and charged me for it without asking, and watched the sun go down behind the dunes of the Western Desert while a boat somewhere in the channel played music I could not identify. It was one of those evenings that required nothing of me.
When to go: Any time between October and March. Elephantine is a half-day or full-day addition to an Aswan itinerary — take the morning ferry, walk the village, see the ruins, eat lunch at one of the family restaurants, return by afternoon. The island is small enough to know well in a day.