Batticaloa City, Beach and Temple

Travel Day 1129 – Trincomalee to Batticaloa, SRI LANKA

Uppuveli Beach would have been the kind of place where one wanted to linger for some time, but because of its extremely high prices it was unfortunately rather a place to check-out and move on quickly…

Hindu Temple after the 2004 Tsunami

While my friend was heading inland, I was going south along the coast and the most logical destination to break my trip seemed to be Batticaloa. Since most of the buses were leaving around 7am, at least we could share a three-wheeler into Trincomalee town, grab some short eats and a tea for the bus ride and then leave for our chosen destinations. Luckily instead of the suggested 7 hour bus ride in the book, it only took about 4 hours on the newly repaired coastal road to actually reach Batticaloa…

As it turned out, Batticaloa stood in stark contrast to Trincomalee in that sense that it was no tourist destination at all. It seemed almost strange because Batticaloa also had a beach, a colonial fortress and some temples to offer, but here nothing was really set up tourists. While this was great in some respect and everything promised to be a bit more authentic, finding accommodation seemed to be the first challenge that needed to me overcome…

Palm Garden of the Resort in Batticaloa

The only possible accommodation in Batticaloa appeared to be outside the city on a skinny long island containing the Kallady and Navalady neighborhoods. The accommodation there once more sounded like the resort type and fearing the worst in terms of prices, I had me dropped off the bus just beyond the Kallady Bridge. Exploration of the area should have been quite easy on food, but unfortunately for no good reason the map of this area had been taken out of the latest LP edition and so I got terribly lost before I even managed to find any of the mentioned resorts…

Luckily whenever things went wrong, there was usually a positive surprise. So first a friendly local picked me up on the road to drive me around on his motorcycle and then I realized that the first resort was not only beautifully located within a palm garden, but it was also super clean and cheap. But best of all was that it was even serving really delicious home cooked Sri Lanken food for a quite reasonable price…

Deserted Natural Beach in Batticaloa

After so many positive surprises, it didn’t even matter any more that there were no must-see sights in Batticaloa and it seemed to be enough to visit what the city had to offer, namely the beach, the fort and some churches or temples. Since I decided to lave the city center and the fort for tomorrow, it seemed to be the best solution to rather explore Kallady and the beach today. Actually the skinny island of Kallady with its palm garden, the backwaters on the one side and the open sea on the other, reminded me quite a bit of Amritapuri…

Only here the ashram was missing and the natural beach was quite a bit nicer. Actually the beach appeared to be a wide, nicely deserted strip of sand, leading to the crushing waves of the ocean and continuing as far as one could see. As this area had also been affected by the 2004 tsunami, some ruined buildings and even a tilted Hindu temple stood testimony of this fatal natural disaster. It was probably a good thing that the temple was left untouched and so it actually had not only become a great reminder of this horrifying event that claimed so many lives, but  it had also become a quite unique landmark of Batticaloa…