Travel Day 1125 – Jaffna, SRI LANKA
Today I set out on a bike again to explore Jaffna and all of a sudden I realized what was different: Jaffna felt more like India…
Ruined Railway Station in Jaffna
It was funny because when I first arrived in Colombo, I was in disbelieve how different Sri Lanka was from India. Everything in Colombo was too clean, there was no chai wallah anywhere and no cows roaming the streets. Now in Jaffna there were suddenly cows slowly making their way through the streets, tea could be found easily and noting was really neat and clean. Actually Jaffna seemed to be quite the opposite and while biking down the main streets I reckoned there were more broken and ruined buildings around than restaurants…
Obviously the civil war had only stopped quite recently and it was still possible to see bullet holes and bomb craters on almost every street corner. My book suggested that one should not venture too far off the beaten track since there were still supposed to be a lot of land mines around. But since the local temples and churches were only mildly interesting I obviously couldn’t resist the temptation of scooping out some ruined buildings while trying to understand a little bit more about the history of Jaffna and Sri Lanka…
Bombed out Kachcheri in Jaffna
The strange thing was that when I arrived in Jaffna, I really didn’t want to see any more ruins, but for some reason the bombed out buildings and bullet holes had a different appeal than the piles of bricks in the ancient cities. So I started with the former Kachcheri, the government department of the district, which apparently used to be quite a prominent building. This probably British built colonnaded Secretariat, which was arranged around a big open courtyard, was entirely bombed out and stripped out of all metals and other useful materials one could find on a construction site…
I found myself just stumbling through the ruins and looking at the scars the war left behind and how nature had already started to slowly re-claim its property. It was a very strange place to visit, especially while thinking that potentially many people lost their lives in this building during the war. The second place I visited thereafter had once been the major transportation hub of the whole area, the British built railway station…
Bullet Holes in Buildings in Jaffna
While I had never seen a bombed out railway station before, it was simply amazing to wander through this ruined ghost building. Literally everywhere signs from the past could be seen as above a hole in the wall “Inquiries” could be read or “3rd Class Entrance” over a bomb crater. The completely overgrown rail beds could be seen, there was still an underpass to reach the middle tracks and a steel bridge above the tracks at the end of the platform. Actually the rails itself had been long gone and as I imagined there must have been a real shortage of supplies at some point. Probably the metal was used to be a precious resource during the war…
Another reminder of the rationed supplies was the fact that barely any vehicles were on the streets and everybody was biking along as I did. At least it was quite fun to be part of the flow in Jaffna and so I spent the rest of the day just cruising around and looking at other buildings that were either bombed out or pierced with bullet holes. This was somehow fascinating as I mentioned before but on the other hand I couldn’t even imagine how life must have been here in Jaffna just a few years back, during the civil war…
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