Asia > Sri Lanka > South Coast > Jaffna > Articles > Tiger Territory

We didn’t get any light refreshments on the flight from Colombo to Jaffna. There were no hot towels, no snacks, and definitely no in-flight entertainment. The safety demonstration consisted of a liverish Ukranian engineer sticking his head in the cabin just before take-off, cupping his hands round his mouth and yelling something about lifejackets. Then he laughed. “Your flight will last vun hour. Good luck.”

Actually, the flight lasted more than an hour. It should have taken just 30 minutes, but a couple of years ago suspected Tamil Tiger rebels downed one of these aircraft with a surface-to-air missile launched from the jungle. So now the route — flown three times daily by antique Russian made Antonovs — swings west over the ocean, flying high and wide above the Palk Straight that separates Sri Lanka from India.

While I was less than thrilled by the idea of the surface-to-air missiles, the route did have its advantages. From up here, the ocean glinted blue and the distant jungle looked as green and impenetrable as broccoli. Indeed, from up here, it was easy to see why this island had once been one of the world’s premier holiday destinations, an Indian Ocean idyll where frostbitten Europeans would come and thaw their buttocks on clean white beaches, soaking up the tea, toddy and right hand reef breaks. From surfers to Buddhists, Sri Lanka offered something for all; a one-stop holiday shop where you could stroll a Dutch fort in the morning, haggle for gems after lunch and go elephant spotting at sundown. Its appeal even weathered a civil war between the government troops and Tamil guerillas - a disastrous, 20 year conflict that claimed 62,000 lives, and displaced more than a million people.

While the south coast attracted tourists throughout the war, some areas remained off limits, either because they were in Tiger hands or because you had to pass through Tiger territory to get there. Now, with the war over, many of these areas are opening up, particularly in the Tamil dominated north and east. One such place is Jaffna, capital of an ancient Tamil kingdom in the north, and one time Tiger stronghold (at least until 1995, when government troops took it in fierce street fighting). I arrived late one afternoon, with the city deep in the grip of an over-ripe sunset, a sticky tropical dusk that soaked everything — people, animals, and buildings— in an amber glow so thick you could bottle it.

Perhaps what is most striking about Jaffna, however, was its physical condition. Almost every house shows signs of war: walls pocked with bullet holes, rooves staved in and rafters poking skyward like busted ribs. Abandoned, these houses have been set upon by all manner of vines, creepers and trees; colonised by a rapacious wave of vegetation that shoves its tendrils worm-like into every nook and cranny, swallowing whole blocks at a time. Jaffna, like the jungle, is in a constant state of rebirth and decay.

What also struck me was the lack of traffic. Because of a past government embargo on car parts and petrol, pushbikes have established themselves as the principal form of transport, lending the place an unexpectedly belle époque air. While this makes getting around more difficult, it also means you can wander aimlessly on the road with little risk of getting beeped at or run over (a daily occurrence in Colombo).

It is also oddly calming. When I first got to Jaffna, it felt abandoned, deflated. It was, in fact, just quiet. Instead of car horns and hysterical motorists, Jaffna’s signature sounds were the squeak of springs and hinges, and the unmistakable sigh of rubber tyres on a sandy road.

Still, a city kid can only take so much peace and tranquility, so pretty soon I was off, heading for another of Sri Lanka’s previously hard-to-reach gems, Trincomalee, on the island’s north-east coast. With its fine harbour, renowned seafood and wild beaches (such as the famous Nilaveli), Trinco is something of cause celebre. Like Jaffna, southerners consider it to be forbidden fruit; a tad dicey, perhaps, but well worth the risk.

To reach it, I had to take a bus from Colombo, as trains to the east were out of operation. (Government troops ripped up the tracks years ago in order to build their bunkers). Unfortunately, the “highways” are notoriously bad, narrow, potholed, and rutted, so a bus journey of any length becomes a battle in itself, a grim war of attrition where, for hours on end, you receive a heavy calibre arse-pounding courtesy of a steel seat wrapped in approximately one millimetre of worn vinyl.

Perhaps this is why I never made it to Trinco. The lure of the seafood couldn’t compete with the likelihood of losing sensation in the lower half of my body. And besides, at one of the frequent check points en route, I met a Tamil man called Siva who was driving his own vehicle to Batticaloa (or Batti, as it’s fondly known), another Tamil town on the east coast. Did I want a lift? He had a white Pajero, with plenty of room. And padded seats. Suddenly, I realised how much I’d always wanted to see Batticaloa.

The trip was enlightening. Emerging from the inland forests, the terrain became flatter and increasingly arid, the lush interior giving way to the scrub of the east. The island was in severe drought (so much so that government employees had been instructed to pray for rain). But, as Siva explained, the east had always been drier than the west, a fact that had shaped the Tamil people themselves.

“In the west, it’s so fertile that all you have to do is toss a seed in the ground and it grows, whereas here, where the Tamils live, you must dig for a long time before you hit water,” he said. “For that reason Tamils have moved off the land and toward the universities, becoming intellectuals and professionals.”

Another thing I noticed as we neared Batti was the Sri Lankan Army guard towers: tall, spindly timber turrets on top of which perch one-man pillboxes, precarious looking shelters cobbled together, like birds’ nests, with corrugated iron and palm fronds. During the war, the government had control of Batticaloa while the surrounding province remained in Tiger hands. Keeping this road open was a constant battle and involved clearing the tall grass on either side so guerillas couldn’t get close enough to lay mines.

If I’d been expecting Batti to be another Jaffna, I was in for a shock. Built around a system of fish-rich lagoons, Batti is a hive of gold shops and general stores, a steamy hub of commerce thronged with motorbikes and tuk-tuks, not to mention goats, dogs, cats, crows and, of course, stray cows. By the roadsides people establish impromptu fish markets, their cane mats covered in all manner of seafood.

Batti, then, is as manic as Jaffna is mellow. It is also very pretty. Predominantly Hindu, many elaborate temples are sprinkled about town. There are also a few handsome mosques and Catholic churches. But the town’s centrepiece is the lagoon, criss-crossed by bridges and bunds, and plied day in day out by fishermen in dug-out canoes.

On my second night in town, Siva and I shared a beer on the terrace of the Lake View Hotel, a spectacularly dilapidated guest-house that overlooks the lagoon. The sun was setting, turning the water deep mauve. Siva ordered curried mud crab, solemnly pronouncing it “the very best dish in Sri Lanka”.

The thing to realise about Batti, as with Jaffna and Trinco, is that they don’t have tourist attractions per se. In Batti, the main item of historical significance is the Dutch fort, whose old stone walls border the lagoon, but the army has its headquarters there and it is ringed by rolls of barbed wire and spot lights. No guided tours quite yet, unfortunately.

No, the real pleasure to be had from going to these towns is simply walking the back streets, hanging out, chatting with the locals. Sit in a tea shop and watch the street life. Relax in an ice-creamery. You’ll soon get in a conversation with someone, and conversation is a type of tour, an exploration of someone else’s world. The very reason, after all, that we travel.

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