Travel Day 1126 – Jaffna and Point Pedro, SRI LANKA
The explorational bike ride yesterday had been really enjoyable, especially because I not only found destroyed buildings, but also signs of hope…
Ruins and New Road in Point Pedro
Obviously the main road I had arrived on, the A9, was a brand new road, making access to Jaffna not only possible, but also a whole lot easier than on the usually quite poorly maintained roads in Sri Lanka. The same proved actually true for all the mayor roads in Jaffna, all of them seemed to be perfectly repaired or even newly built. The only mayor access missing to the area was the once existing rail link, but it seemed that it would only be a matter of time until that would be fully re-established…
The railway station was obviously still a complete ruin, but a few freshly done core drills in the concrete slabs suggested that at least some tests were happening to consider how much of the existing building could be saved and renovated. While this was only vaguely suggesting hope, much more hope could be experienced while looking at the back area of the rail yard. Here some piles of rails had already arrived with new concrete rail-beds and some heavy machinery to eventually lay them in place…
Renovation Work of Houses in Jaffna
In fact when I spoke with some locals, they suggest the rail connection was supposed to be done in 2014 and the railway station was scheduled to re-open some time thereafter. That for me was the biggest sign of hope as a functioning rail connection would make easy access to goods and cheap travel for people quite possible. Besides the much-needed rail access, I found some housing projects that seemed to be undergoing some major renovations and modernizations…
A lot of houses and apartment buildings were obviously in pretty poor state of maintenance and living conditions seemed sometimes extremely old-fashioned. One entire housing complex I came by was looking especially run down and people from the five storey building still had to run down to fetch water from a well, but when I was biking around, I found that on the other end of the complex renovation works were already well on the way…
Rails, Rail-beds and Machinery, Jaffna
So with an overall sense of hope I hopped on a local bus and drove out to the country side and the very northern tip of Sri Lanka, called Point Pedro. This Portuguese named sleepy village had surprisingly little to offer in terms of sights, but it was great to just stroll around and spot some old colonial buildings here and there. Here too I found some signs of hope, even if mainly just in form of road construction. Some streets were still lined with completely ruined houses, but at least the road was already brand new…
While all of these signs of hope were rather subtle, they still existed and they seemed to be very important for the area and the people. Even if it would probably take many years to fully build up the north of Sri Lanka again, and even if some rural areas of Jaffna seemed to be untouched by any sort of development, at least things seemed to be on the way already and heading in the right direction. I personally was quite happy about that and I was very sure that when I would visit next time, things would definitely look quite differently already…
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