Blogs from Jaffna, Northern Province, Sri Lanka, Asia

HE SAID... Today we were travelling north from Anuradhapura to Jaffna. We woke at 6am, organised our packs and headed down to breakfast. I served myself super sweet sultana bran, toast, jam, pol roti (coconut roti), pol sambol (shredded coconut with onions, chilli and lime), tea and fruit juice. I wasn’t feeling 100%% – a chest cold had swept through our previous group, and it seemed to be catching up with me after a few days incubation. We checked out of our comfortable hotel (The Lakeside at Nuwarawewa), drove a short distance (via minibus) to Anuradhapura’s quiet and uncrowded railway station, walked to our platform and boarded the train to Jaffna at 9:30am. We snacked on incredibly tasty vegetable pan rolls (filled and rolled up crepes, that are crumbed and fried) that we’d picked from the ... read more

I had been to Jaffna with family and friends before my teenage years which means i can't remember. But the lagoons, the spicy food and Crab, which is also a synominous to Jaffna and the Palm fringed landscape are few things i vaguely remember. They say the mind is selective. You only remember what you want to remember. Even as a kid. I think that's what happened. Anyways, 2009 came, the war was finally over after 3 decades of misery. The guns were finally silenced and it was a brand new beginning. Peace has finally dawned on the island which everyone longed for. Like most people, i was thrilled of the fact that we could now finally discover this fertile, rugged, Palm fringed land and it's beautiful peninsula. After a year had passed and the dust ... read more

Jaffna Streets and the Dutch Fort: As we travelled north past Vivuniya we couldn't help but wonder what we would find in Jaffna. To the left and right were pockmarked, roofless, partly-destroyed buildings and vast areas with very little population. The civil war which started in 1983 had taken quite a toll on the countryside. The highway itself had been "newly carpeted", which means it had been improved and had new "blacktop" on it, so the road was smooth enough, and the trainline was being rebuilt and had gotten as far as Kilinochchie, once the centre of the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) separatist administration. Have you ever read "Havana Bay"? It talks about the sense of timewarp when going to Cuba, where the cars on the road are from the 1950s, from the time before the US ... read more

Jaffna and Point Pedro: A Promise Fulfilled Part of the reason we wanted to visit Sri Lanka is because in the past year we have made friends with many Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Sydney. So of course we offered to take presents and messages to their families back home. Francis Nimalraj, who is now employed near Berowra thanks to Azadeh's help, stopped by after work one day with some boxes of gourmet chocolates for us to take to his family. He knew we were going to his home place of Jaffna in the far north. These were not the only gifts we carried to Sri Lanka, but they were the last to get delivered, due to our idiosyncratic pathway through the country. What we didn't know was that Jaffna is both a city and a ... read more

Note to self, and others. I wrote this a few days ago but this silly website hasn’t let me post it until now. Well hello one and all! I have only been in Sri Lanka a few days but already I can tell I am going to like it. The people here seem very decent and hospitable which makes things much easier. For me it is not the sights that make a place, but the people. After a while temples and beaches only hold limited appeal, what keeps you going is the people you are surrounded by, and in the case of Sri Lanka I may just have I have stuck gold. After the relatively sedentary time in Thailand I felt the need to get back in to travelling again, actually physically moving around. The rest ... read more