Jaffna and Sri Lanka's Northern Peninsula by Car: the A9 Road, the Temples and the Islands

It all starts with the A9, the historic axis running up the island from the centre to the north via Vavuniya, before crossing Elephant Pass — the isthmus that guards the entrance to the Jaffna peninsula. Count on roughly 400 km from Colombo, longer in time than in distance: between village crossings, trucks and stretches where you rarely move faster than a local bus, it makes for a long day. The smart move is to leave early in the morning, from Colombo or Kandy, and treat the drive as a stage in its own right rather than a mere transfer.

The road itself tells the country's recent history: it was along this A9, long severed and then reopened after the civil war ended in 2009, that the north reconnected with the rest of the island. Past Elephant Pass, the landscape changes — palmyra palms, flat lagoons, harsher light — and you quickly understand that Jaffna, the Tamil cultural capital, looks nothing like what you've seen in the south. Travellers coming up from the cultural triangle (Sigiriya, Dambulla) start with a solid head start: the leg to Jaffna becomes far more manageable.

The northern peninsula was the epicentre of the conflict that tore Sri Lanka apart until 2009, and its opening to tourism is recent by the island's standards. A study by Buultjens, Ratnayake and Gnanapala, published in 2016 in the journal Current Issues in Tourism, analyses precisely this post-conflict tourism development in the country's north and east: it shows both the benefits tourism can bring to local communities and how fragile that development becomes when it fails to involve them (study available on Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Buultjens+post-conflict+tourism+Sri+Lanka+resilience).

In practical terms, that argues for tourism that benefits the region directly: family-run guesthouses rather than big chains, neighbourhood Tamil restaurants, local guides and boatmen for the islands. Jaffna's public library, burned down in 1981 and later rebuilt, captures the symbolic weight of the place: you visit it as a monument, but it is first and foremost a site of memory for the people who live here. A little discretion and genuine curiosity open far more doors here than anywhere else on the island.

The heart of any visit is the Nallur Kandaswamy temple, the city's great Hindu sanctuary: a golden gopuram, daily ceremonies driven by drums, and a strict dress code — shoulders and legs covered, men required to go bare-chested in certain parts of the temple, shoes left at the entrance. If your trip falls in summer, ask about the annual Nallur festival, one of the most spectacular in the country: several weeks of processions that transform the entire neighbourhood.

Around it, the city can be explored on foot or in short hops by car: the Dutch fort facing the lagoon, a vast star-shaped enclosure whose ramparts you can walk around, the white-domed public library, and the markets where you discover a cuisine unlike anything in the south — Jaffna crab curry, dosas, odiyal (flour made from palmyra palm root) and a wealth of Tamil vegetarian dishes. It's one of the north's great surprises: the food here is different, and remarkably good.

Striking out from the city, two extremities are worth the drive: Point Pedro, the northern tip of the island — the kind of symbolic marker that gives purpose to a half-day of easy driving — and Casuarina beach on Karainagar island, a long strip of sand lined with casuarina trees and one of the peninsula's few swimming beaches.

This is the peninsula's signature: several islands west of Jaffna are linked by raised causeways built at water level, which you drive along with the lagoon on either side, wading birds and fishermen just metres from the tarmac. The sequence leading to the Kurikadduwan (KKD) jetty, at the far end of Punkudutivu island, is in itself one of the most beautiful drives in Sri Lanka — flat, dead straight, unreal.

These roads present no real difficulty but call for a gentle touch: they are narrow, shared with bicycles, tuk-tuks and livestock, and the lagoon wind can catch you off guard. Leave early: the morning light on the lagoons is superb, the heat still bearable, and you'll reach the KKD jetty ahead of the pilgrim crowds if you're aiming for the Nainativu ferry.

From Kurikadduwan, two crossings shape the island-hopping. The first, a short one, leads to Nainativu, a small sacred island where the Nagapooshani Amman Hindu temple, covered in sculptures, and the Nagadeepa Buddhist shrine — one of the most revered pilgrimage sites for Sri Lankan Buddhists — stand a few hundred metres apart. Watching the two religions coexist on a speck of land at the end of the country sums up the spirit of the north rather well.

The second, longer crossing reaches Delft island (Neduntheevu), the most distant and the strangest: wild ponies descended from horses introduced in colonial times, coral-stone walls marking out the plots, a lone baobab and scattered ruins. Once ashore you get around by tuk-tuk or local pick-up — the car stays on the mainland. Allow a full day for Delft, half a day for Nainativu, and check the ferry times the day before: they change with the season and the sea.

Good news for anyone who has experienced driving in the south of the island: traffic on the peninsula is markedly calmer, the roads are decent, and distances are short. But calm doesn't mean empty: cows lying on the road, unlit bicycles, tuk-tuks pulling out without warning — the north is best driven at moderate speed and with constant attention, especially at dusk.

As for paperwork, most foreign travellers rent a car with or without a driver; for self-drive, a temporary local permit is required on top of your usual documents — the process and the options are detailed in our article on driving licences and driving in Sri Lanka. The with-driver formula remains popular for the long A9 leg, with many travellers taking the wheel again once there for the causeways and the drives around Jaffna.

Three days on the ground are enough to see the essentials without rushing, staying in Jaffna itself and heading out in day trips. Here's the outline we recommend, to be adjusted around ferry times and the weather:

Our guide «Sri Lanka en autonomie» devotes a full chapter to the north: the A9 leg in detail with the useful stops, the ferry times for Nainativu and Delft season by season, where to sleep and eat Tamil food in Jaffna, and the with-or-without-driver trade-off broken down item by item. One piece of advice before you go: don't squeeze Jaffna in as a quick detour between two southern stops. The peninsula deserves its three full days — it's precisely because so few people go that it's worth the journey.