Uppuveli Beach in Tamil Trincomalee

Travel Day 1127 – Jaffna to Trincomalee, SRI LANKA

After some really interesting days in Jaffna, it was time to pack up and move on, but I wouldn’t leave the Tamil area quite yet…

Arrival at the Beach in Trincomalee

Since I had travelled north trough the center of Sri Lanka, it seemed only natural to now travel south along the coast and my first destination was the beach in Trincomalee. Actually my destination was Uppuveli Beach in Trincomalee, which was still part of the Tamil territory and I was hoping to see a little bit more of this area on my long bus ride. Unfortunately there wasn’t much to see along the way and the bus ride turned out to be a bit longer than expected as well…

There were two direct buses leaving from Jaffna to Trincomalee, at 6am and at 7am, and both were scheduled to make the trip in about 7 hours. Since the 6am bus was supposed to pass by my guesthouse in the morning, I made sure to stand by the street while waving at every single bus passing by. The Trincomalee bus never showed up and after waiting for much too long, I only barely made it into the city to finally catch the 7am bus. As it turned out, it was missing my guest house by about 50 meters, which was probably the reason why I never caught the 6am bus in the first place…

Evening Swim at Uppuveli Beach

Anyway, the bus ride down to Vavuniya on the new road was quick and easy. Even the military check posts just let us pass without any hustle and this time I didn’t have to leave the bus or go to am interview, as I had to do on the way up. But then the second leg of the bus ride , from Vavuniya to Trincomalee turned out to be a real drag. Not only was the road still the old, bumpy one, but even worse, it was well under construction and slowing us down since we constantly had to switch the dusty lanes back and forth, back and forth…

Eventually by the afternoon we made it to Trincomalee and after a little lunch break we found ourselves in a local bus towards Uppuveli Beach. Uppuveli was the closest local beach and apparently the area with all the budget accommodation. Unfortunately this wasn’t really the case and nothing in Uppuveli seemed to qualify as budget accommodation, at least not according to my budget. But luckily in the bus from Jaffna there had been one other traveler and we decided to simply share the burden…

Resort Guest-House in Trincomalee

All the guest houses we had seen in Uppuveli were rather little resorts and after walking along the beach for much too long, we simply shared a room in what seemed to be the best option of the limited range of accommodation. But at least the resort guest-house came with a setting right by the beach and a palm tree garden with a pool and an open bamboo restaurant which helped us to quickly get over the price it came with. And what helped even more to forget, was the arrival at the sea and at the beach…

It had really been quite a long, sweaty time in the center of Sri Lanka and I was more than happy to finally be at a real beach again. So even it was quite late already, once we settled-in it was still early enough to go for a nice long dip in the refreshing water and to watch the sun set while having a bite at the open restaurant. Yeah, Sri Lanka was all of a sudden feeling a bit like vacation and this Tamil area was feeling galaxies away from Jaffna…