Colombo, July 22 (Inditop.com) For decades it lay at the heart of Sri Lanka’s Tamil conflict. Now that the Tamil Tigers have been crushed, Jaffna’s once tranquil beaches are getting ready for tourists from far and wide.
The Tamil residents of Jaffna peninsula, in the island’s very northern tip, are hoping that the beaches would badly revive their battered economy and improve their own living standards.
Sri Lankan officials are brimming with confidence. They feel that Jaffna’s beaches, once opened, would be a valuable addition to local and foreign tourists.
“Now that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) is gone, we are preparing to develop Sri Lanka’s north in a big way,” S. Kalaiselvam, a Tamil who heads the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, told IANS.
It will not be an easy task though.
Jaffna, the heartland of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, is where Tamil militancy erupted in the 1970s. It was also the birthplace of most LTTE leaders, including its founder Velupillai Prabhakaran who was killed by the military as it overran the last of rebel bastions in May.
For a quarter century, Jaffna was deprived of tourism. The hundreds of thousands of tourists who flocked to Sri Lanka settled for the beaches on the country’s western and southern coasts.
Only recently have the beaches in the east begun to pick up traffic.
Jaffna is also now without the infrastructure to house tourists should they start coming. There are issues of security. Many coastal areas remain dotted with military installations.
Jaffna now has only about 50 hotel rooms, officials say.
“In two years, we hope to have nearly 1,000 rooms there. There is a tremendous amount of interest in the private sector to develop hotels in the north as we hope to receive a large number of tourists,” Kalaiselvam said.
“We are confident that the territory that lay untapped for 25 years would now be fully developed for tourism,” he added. “It is a huge area having beautiful beaches and tourists would like it.”
Sri Lankan authorities plan to increase the number of the hugely popular flights from Colombo to Jaffna from the present three to six a week.
“We are also going to introduce a ferry service from Colombo to the north so that the tourists enjoy the sea route,” Kalaiselvam said. “It would be a beautiful experience. Tourists would spend an entire day on the ferry.”
For those who like to travel overland, there will be the winding A-9 highway connecting Colombo to Jaffna peninsula via a narrow isthmus called the Elephant Pass — so named because it was once an elephant track.
That highway has remained shut for years because of the war. In the process much of the road has ceased to exist. Vast areas through which the highway passed was under LTTE control.
The government is according priority to repairing the highway since most travellers can only afford the bus.
“It will be repaired within three months,” the tourism official said. “It will provide easy road access to (Jaffna).”
Sri Lanka’s winding palm-fringed and sandy beaches attract millions of tourists every year.
The most popular beaches are Negombo, Colombo, Mount Lavinia, Bentota, Hikkaduwa and Galle, all of them dotted along the west and southwest coast and which were far removed from the conflict zone.
Less known but equally attractive beaches also lie on the east coast: Trincomalee, Nilaveli and Arugam Bay.
Sri Lankan beaches are known for sun bathing, diving, fishing, surfing, underwater photography and water sports.
If all goes well, Jaffna would see all that — and perhaps more.
