Taxi from Colombo Airport (CMB) to Jaffna

Jaffna is a long way from the aeroplane. That is the first thing to understand about this transfer, and very nearly the only thing that shapes every other decision you will make about it. The peninsula sits at the top of the island, the airport sits near the bottom, and the road between them runs the entire length of the country.

The drive covers around 374 kilometres and takes in the region of 420 minutes — seven hours — door to door. That makes it the longest mainland transfer we run from Bandaranaike International Airport by a considerable margin. Nothing else on the island asks for a full working day behind the windscreen in quite the same way.

Seven hours is not a reason not to do it. A great many people drive it every week and arrive perfectly cheerful, and the road itself is one of the better ones in the country. But it is a fact that deserves planning around rather than discovering somewhere north of Vavuniya with three hours still to go. This page is about the shape of the day, the alternatives that genuinely exist, and what waits at the other end, which is a city quite unlike anywhere else in Sri Lanka.

The journey at a glance

The figures first, because everything else follows from them:

• Distance: around 374 km by road from Bandaranaike International Airport to Jaffna.
• Time: about 420 minutes — seven hours — in ordinary conditions.
• Shape of the drive: expressway from Katunayake to the northern edge of Colombo, then inland and north across the plain to Anuradhapura, then the long straight run up the A9 through Vavuniya, Kilinochchi and Elephant Pass onto the peninsula.
• The road is good and the distance is the difficulty. This is not a hard drive in the way a hill road is hard. It is simply long, and it is long in a flat, bright, repetitive landscape that gives the eye very little to argue with.
• Most people do not do it in one push. They break it, usually at Anuradhapura, or they take the train, or they fly. All three are sensible and this page treats them as such.

Seven hours is a realistic figure rather than a pessimistic one. It assumes ordinary traffic, one proper stop and no drama. It stretches if you leave the airport at nine in the morning and hit the towns on the way north at their busiest, if it rains hard on the northern plain, or if you stop for a long lunch and a look at something. It does not shrink very much, because the road north of Anuradhapura is already about as quick as an ordinary two-lane road gets.

The single most useful thing you can do with that number is to decide, before you fly, whether you are spending it in one day or two. Everything else on this page is downstream of that choice.

The A9 north, and how the country changes on the way

The road changes character four or five times between the airport and the peninsula, and each change is a fair marker of how far along you are. It is worth knowing the sequence, because a seven-hour drive with no landmarks feels far longer than a seven-hour drive where you can tell roughly where you stand.

Out of Katunayake and around the top of Colombo

The expressway from Katunayake to the northern edge of Colombo is the only stretch of this journey that behaves entirely predictably, and it does the first part of the work. Three lanes, few junctions, nothing much to look at. Most people sleep through it after a night flight and there is no reason not to.

The old road through Ja-Ela and Wattala is still there and still used when the expressway is closed, but it runs through the middle of every town on the way and takes very much longer. If your car ends up on it, that is why, and nobody has chosen it for the pleasure of the thing.

Crucially, you never enter Colombo. The route clips the northern fringe of the city and turns away from it. Going north is one of the few directions from this airport that does not involve the capital at all, which is a small mercy on a day with this much road in it.

Inland to Anuradhapura

Beyond the city fringe the car turns inland and settles into its northward run. Drivers differ over the exact line here — some go up through Kurunegala and across the plain, others take the coast road through Puttalam and cut inland later — and both arrive at much the same place in much the same time. Ask if you care; otherwise it makes little practical difference.

What you see through the window for the first couple of hours is coconut country: rank after rank of palms in disciplined rows, husks stacked for coir at the roadside, mats of copra drying on concrete, and stalls selling king coconut, the orange ones, drunk from the shell with a straw cut into the top. It is a working landscape rather than a scenic one, and it is the last of the wet zone you will see for several days.

Somewhere along this stretch the country dries out. The green goes from a wet green to a harder, greyer, more olive green. Tamarind and palu trees appear. The soil pales. The hills flatten into a plain with occasional bare rock domes standing on it, and the sky gets a good deal bigger. This is the dry zone, and the boundary is a genuine climatic one rather than a figure of speech.

Anuradhapura, and the start of the A9 proper

Anuradhapura is roughly the halfway mark and it is the obvious place to stop, whether for twenty minutes or for a night. The road skirts the old city rather than running through the sacred precinct, and from the car you may catch the white curve of one of the great dagobas standing above the treeline, which is the first hint that the plain you have been crossing was once the centre of everything on this island.

North of Anuradhapura the road becomes the A9 in the sense that most people mean when they say it: the long straight highway to the peninsula. It is well surfaced, generously wide by Sri Lankan standards, and it runs through country that is emptier with every kilometre. Tanks — the ancient man-made reservoirs that made agriculture possible here — appear on both sides, sometimes as sheets of water with egrets standing in the shallows, sometimes as cracked mud with buffalo lying in what is left.

Vavuniya and the dry northern plain

Vavuniya is the last town of any real size before the peninsula and the traditional dividing line between the centre of the island and the north. It is a busy junction town rather than a destination, and its practical value on this drive is that it is the last easy place to fill a tank, use a decent washroom and buy something cold before a long thin stretch of road.

North of Vavuniya the landscape opens out into scrub and dry forest, thorny and low, with long straight sections of road where you can see a kilometre ahead. Settlement thins. Cattle wander the verge with a serene disregard for traffic, and drivers slow for them as a matter of routine. Then the vegetation begins to change again, and the first palmyra palms appear: tall, bare-trunked, with a stiff fan of leaves at the top like a clenched hand. Once you start seeing them you are properly in the north.

Kilinochchi and Elephant Pass

Kilinochchi is the main town of the mainland north, spread along the highway, and beyond it the land narrows dramatically. Elephant Pass is the isthmus where the peninsula joins the rest of the island — a strip of road with lagoon water on both sides, salt flats shimmering white in the middle distance, and almost nothing growing. The name is old and comes from the elephants that were once driven across the shallows here on their way south.

It is the most striking piece of geography on the whole drive. For a few minutes the car is effectively at sea level with water to the left and water to the right, birds working the shallows, and the peninsula waiting on the far side. There are memorials by the road at Elephant Pass. They are part of the landscape and people stop at them; that is a matter for each traveller and this page will say no more about it.

Onto the peninsula

Past the isthmus the road runs through Pallai and Kodikamam and Chavakachcheri and the country changes for the last time. This is the peninsula proper: flat, bright, limestone underfoot, palmyra everywhere, red soil where it has been dug, and a landscape organised around wells and small walled plots rather than paddy. Villages here have the low compound walls, the whitewash and the kovil gopurams that tell you unmistakably that you have arrived somewhere with its own way of doing things. Jaffna comes up quietly, without suburbs to speak of, and then you are in it.

Leaving the airport and meeting your driver

Arrivals at Katunayake opens onto a covered set-down area, and drivers wait past the exit rather than inside the hall. Meeting outside the terminal building is normal here rather than a sign that anything has gone wrong. Come through customs, walk out under the canopy, and look for your name.

Give the flight number when you book. It is worth more than a landing time, because a driver who has it will follow the flight and wait through a delay rather than through a booked hour. On a journey of this length that matters more than usual: nobody wants the seven hours to begin with an argument.

Flights from Europe and the Gulf land in a cluster before dawn, which is the one time of day the roads around Colombo are genuinely clear. If your flight is one of them, you have been handed the best possible start to this particular drive, and the case for setting off straight away rather than sleeping near the airport is strong.

Before you leave the terminal, do the small practical things. Draw cash, because the towns thin out as you go north, and buy a local SIM at the airport counters if you want one. Use the washroom; the next one that meets airport standards is a good way up the road.

Whether to break the journey, and where

This is the real decision, and it deserves more thought than most transfer questions.

Doing it in one push works, and plenty of people do. It suits arrivals that land before dawn, travellers without small children, and anyone who would rather spend their nights in one place than two. You leave the airport at five, you stop twice, and you are in Jaffna in the afternoon with the day not entirely gone. Done that way it is a long but entirely civilised drive.

Doing it in one push is a poor idea if you land in the middle of the day. A midday arrival, with immigration and baggage behind it, puts you on the road at one or two o'clock, which means arriving in an unfamiliar city well after dark at the end of a flight and a full drive. That is the version of this transfer people remember badly.

Breaking the journey turns the whole thing into a better trip rather than a compromise. The drive divides naturally at roughly its halfway point, and the halfway point happens to be one of the great historical cities of Asia. It is difficult to think of a more agreeable accident of geography.

The other halts people use are Dambulla, which is slightly off the direct line but sensible if the Cultural Triangle is on your itinerary anyway, and Vavuniya, which is closer to the peninsula and useful mainly if you want the second day to be short. Neither has Anuradhapura's advantage of being somewhere you would want to spend an evening in its own right.

Anuradhapura: the halt worth making properly

If you break the drive anywhere, break it here, and give it more than a night if you can.

Anuradhapura was the capital of the island for well over a thousand years, and what remains is not a single monument but a whole city laid out across several square kilometres of parkland: enormous brick dagobas, the stone foundations of monasteries, bathing ponds cut into rock, guardstones and moonstones at the foot of vanished staircases, and the great irrigation tanks that made all of it possible in a landscape this dry.

The centre of it, in every sense that matters to Sri Lankans, is the Sri Maha Bodhi — a sacred fig grown from a cutting of the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment, brought here in the third century BCE and tended continuously ever since. It is among the oldest documented trees in the world with a known planting date, and it remains a living place of worship rather than a ruin. White-clad pilgrims come with lotus flowers and oil lamps at all hours. Visitors are welcome, quietly and with shoulders and knees covered, and shoes come off at the entrance to the terrace.

The dagobas are the other thing people remember. Ruwanwelisaya is the one most visitors see first, brilliantly white and encircled by a wall of stone elephants. Jetavanaramaya and Abhayagiri are older and largely unrestored, mountains of weathered brick standing out of the trees, and their scale takes a moment to register. Isurumuniya, a small rock temple by a tank, holds the famous carving usually called the lovers, and is a far more intimate thing than the great stupas.

Practically: the sacred city is spread out and the sensible way to see it is from a car with a driver who waits, moving between sites rather than walking between them in the middle of the day. It is hot here and there is very little shade. Early morning and late afternoon are both better than noon, for the light as much as the temperature. A day hire is the natural shape for that kind of day, and it slots neatly into a two-day run north without any additional arrangement.

Two nights at Anuradhapura turns the Jaffna transfer into a proper leg of a holiday. One night makes it manageable. Even a two-hour stop on the way through, walking to the Bodhi tree and back, changes the day from a slog into a journey with something in the middle of it.

The train to Jaffna, honestly

The Northern Line runs all the way to Jaffna and on to Kankesanthurai at the top of the peninsula, and it is a genuine alternative to this drive rather than a curiosity. It is worth setting out what you gain and what you give up, because the answer is not the same for everybody.

What you gain is comfort and the absence of road. You can walk about, sleep properly, read, and watch the same landscape go past without anybody having to concentrate on it. The line runs through the dry zone and the northern plain in long unhurried stretches, and the palmyra country is at least as good from a carriage window as from a car. For solo travellers and couples without much luggage it is often the better choice outright.

There is an overnight service as well as daytime trains, and for a great many people it is the neatest solution to this particular problem: you leave Colombo in the evening, sleep through the middle of the island, and arrive in the north in the morning with a full day in front of you and no hotel spent on the journey. Sleeping accommodation on the night service is limited and is the first thing to sell out, so it is booked well in advance rather than on the day.

What you give up is flexibility and door-to-door convenience. Trains run from Colombo, not from the airport, so a train journey still begins with a transfer from Katunayake into the city and a wait for a departure. At the far end the station is not the peninsula, and the peninsula is where most of the things you have come to see actually are. Timetables change with the seasons and with engineering work, and they should be checked against current information rather than anything written on a page in advance.

The combination that works best for most people is not car or train but both: take the train north, and have a car and driver waiting in Jaffna for the days you are there. That gives you the pleasant part of the journey and the useful part of the vehicle, and it avoids the one thing the train cannot solve, which is getting to Kayts and Point Pedro once you have arrived.

Flying, and why some travellers do

There are domestic flights to the peninsula, landing at the airport at Palaly near Kankesanthurai, a short run north of the city. The flight is a small hop of well under an hour in a light turboprop, and for travellers on a tight schedule it converts a full day of travelling into a morning.

The reasons to fly are straightforward. You are on a two-week trip and cannot give two days of it to a road. You are travelling with someone who does not manage long journeys well. You want to spend three days on the peninsula rather than three days getting to and from it. Any of those is a perfectly good reason, and there is no virtue in the drive for its own sake.

The reasons not to are equally straightforward. Domestic schedules and operators in Sri Lanka change more often than international ones, seats are limited, and baggage allowances on light aircraft are generally modest, so anything you are carrying needs checking against the current rules rather than assumed. Fares aside, a flight is a fixed thing: it goes when it goes, and a delayed international arrival can leave you looking at a road transfer anyway.

Many people settle on flying one way and driving the other, usually flying north and driving south at the end, when the halt at Anuradhapura fits an itinerary heading for the Cultural Triangle in any case.

Arriving in Jaffna, and how the city is laid out

Jaffna is smaller than people expect and easier to make sense of than most Sri Lankan towns. It is flat, it is low-built, and it is organised loosely around a few long roads rather than a single dense centre.

The old heart is by the lagoon at the south-western edge, where the fort stands, and the commercial centre sits inland of it: the market, the bus stand, the shops along Hospital Road and Kasturiya Road, and the clock tower. North and east of that, the town spreads into quiet residential streets of walled compounds, wells, mango trees and small kovils, and it is in these streets that Jaffna is most itself. Nallur, with its great temple, is a district in its own right on the north-eastern side.

The public library is one of the buildings people go out of their way to look at: a white, domed, faintly Mughal-looking structure standing in its own grounds. It is a working library, and it is held in real affection here.

The important structural point for a visitor is that the city is not the destination — the peninsula is. Jaffna town is where you sleep and eat, and the things that will fill your days are spread across a landscape of villages, temples, beaches and islands that extends well beyond it in every direction. Several of the best of them are on islands reached by causeways.

That is why a car for the duration makes far more sense here than individual transfers. Public transport exists and is used by everyone, but it is built around the working day of the peninsula rather than around visitors, and a morning at Keerimalai followed by an afternoon at Casuarina is a very different proposition with a car waiting than without one. A day hire on the peninsula is the standard arrangement, and it is the one thing most first-time visitors say afterwards they should have organised sooner.

One further thing worth arranging in advance: ask for a driver who speaks Tamil. It is the working language of the north, and while Sinhala and English will both get you through, a Tamil-speaking driver changes the texture of a day here — directions, temple etiquette, a conversation at a roadside stall, an explanation of what is being sold. It is a small request and it makes a disproportionate difference.

A brief and necessary note about the region

The Northern Province was at the centre of Sri Lanka's civil war, which ended in 2009. That is a plain fact about the recent history of the places this road passes through, and it is the reason travel to the peninsula was not possible for a long period. The A9 and the railway have since been rebuilt end to end, and the journey described on this page is an ordinary one that people make daily in both directions.

Beyond that, this is not a page about the war, and Jaffna is not a footnote to one. It is a living Tamil city with its own language, its own food, its own festivals and a very long history that runs back many centuries before the twentieth. That is what the rest of this article is about. Where any local arrangement is unclear to you, ask in Jaffna rather than relying on anything written elsewhere in advance; things change, and local information is current information.

Nallur Kandaswamy Kovil

Nallur is the great temple of the peninsula and the single place most visitors go first. It is dedicated to Murugan — Kandaswamy, Skanda, the god of the hill and the spear — and it stands in a walled compound of red and white horizontal stripes with a gold-topped gopuram rising above the surrounding streets.

Nallur is a working temple, busy at every puja, and it is not primarily a sight. The etiquette matters more here than at most places on the tourist circuit. Shoes come off well before the entrance. Dress modestly, with shoulders and legs covered. Men are asked to remove their shirts before entering the inner areas, which is normal practice at Murugan temples in the north and takes first-time visitors by surprise; it is a mark of respect rather than a formality. Photography inside is restricted and the restrictions are worth observing without needing to be asked twice.

The temple's annual festival runs for around twenty-five days in the middle of the year, usually falling across July and August, and it culminates in the chariot festival, when an enormous wooden ther is drawn through the streets by hand before immense crowds. If your travel dates coincide with it, everything about Jaffna changes: the town fills, accommodation goes early, the streets around the temple close, and the atmosphere is quite unlike anything else in the country. If your dates do not coincide with it, go anyway, at dusk, when the lamps are lit and the drums start.

The fort, and the lagoon edge

Jaffna Fort sits low on the lagoon at the edge of town and is one of the largest European fortifications in Asia. The Portuguese built the first version of it in the seventeenth century and the Dutch rebuilt it far larger as a star fort — a great five-pointed geometry of ramparts and ravelins, faced in coral stone and surrounded by a moat.

Restoration has been going on for years and it is a rewarding place to walk rather than a museum to be led round. You can get up onto the ramparts and make a circuit of them, with the town on one side and the lagoon flat and silver on the other, and the scale of the thing only really registers once you are up there and can see how far the walls run. Late afternoon is the time to do it, partly for the light and partly because there is no shade at all.

The lagoon edge below the fort is where Jaffna goes in the evening. Fishing boats work the shallows, the causeway roads run off westward towards the islands, and the sunsets over the water are the reason half the town appears to be standing there at six o'clock.

The islands, and the causeways

The islands are the part of the peninsula that most surprises people, and they are the strongest single argument for having a car while you are here.

West of Jaffna a chain of low islands runs out into the shallow sea, and the first of them are joined to the mainland by causeways — long straight roads built just above the water with the sea on both sides and almost nothing between you and the horizon. Driving them is a genuinely odd sensation, closer to being at sea than on land, and the light out there in the early morning is remarkable.

Kayts is the nearest of the islands, reached by causeway from the edge of the city. It is a quiet place of small villages, fishing jetties, coconut and palmyra, and an old church or two, and it is worth an hour of unhurried driving simply for the atmosphere of it.

Karainagar, reached by its own causeway to the north-west, holds Casuarina Beach, which is the beach of the peninsula: pale sand, casuarina trees behind it, and water so shallow that you can wade a long way out. It is a family beach and it is at its busiest on Sunday afternoons, which is either a reason to go or a reason to go on a weekday, depending entirely on temperament.

Nainativu, also called Nagadeepa, is reached by a short ferry from the jetty at Kurikadduwan, at the end of the causeway road beyond Kayts. The island holds two places of pilgrimage a few minutes apart: the Nagapooshani Amman Kovil, a large and vividly painted temple with a great gopuram visible from the water, and the Nagadeepa Purana Viharaya, one of the sixteen most sacred Buddhist sites on the island. The pair of them, side by side, is one of the more quietly eloquent things in Sri Lanka.

Delft, properly Neduntivu, is the far island and a longer ferry ride again. It is another world: coral-block walls dividing the fields, wild ponies descended from stock left by the Dutch, an ancient baobab tree standing improbably in the scrub, a ruined fort, and a horizon that is mostly sky. Delft is a full day and the boats are weather-dependent, so it is planned rather than improvised, and the timings are checked locally on the day.

Ferry schedules, capacities and jetties are exactly the sort of thing that changes, and any plan involving Nainativu or Delft should be confirmed in Jaffna rather than assumed from anything written in advance.

Point Pedro and the northern coast

The northern edge of the peninsula is the top of Sri Lanka, and it has a distinct character of its own: harder light, more wind, more palmyra, fewer people.

Point Pedro is the northernmost town on the island, with a lighthouse and a long working fishing shore. East and south of it lie the sand dunes at Manalkadu, an unexpected stretch of drifting sand with a half-buried colonial church standing in it, which is one of the strangest sights in the north. Valvettithurai, along the coast to the west, is an old maritime town with a boat-building tradition and a seafront worth the detour.

On the northern coast near Kankesanthurai is Keerimalai, a freshwater spring that rises within a few metres of the sea and feeds a walled bathing pool. It has been a place of pilgrimage and healing for a very long time and it remains in daily use; the Naguleswaram temple stands close by. Bathing arrangements are separated by gender and the pool is a functioning religious site rather than a swimming pool, which is worth knowing before you arrive in a swimming costume.

Access arrangements in parts of the far north can change from time to time. Rather than plan around anything read in advance, ask locally on the day; it is the kind of thing every driver in Jaffna knows the current position on.

Jaffna food, which is its own cuisine

This is the part of the peninsula that catches southern Sri Lankans as much as foreign visitors off guard. Jaffna cooking is not southern Sri Lankan cooking with different names. It is a distinct northern Tamil cuisine, with its own spicing, its own staples and its own logic, and it is one of the genuine reasons to come.

The foundation is Jaffna curry powder, which is darker, drier and hotter than what is used in the south, heavy with roasted chilli, coriander, fennel and fenugreek. The souring comes from tamarind more than from goraka, and there is a generous hand with black pepper. The result is sharper and more direct than the coconut-rounded curries of the south-west.

Seafood carries the menu, because the peninsula is nearly surrounded by shallow water. Jaffna crab curry is the dish everyone names first and it earns the reputation: whole crab in a dark, fierce, tamarind-sharp gravy that is eaten with the hands and is not a tidy business. Prawns, cuttlefish and small fish are everywhere, cooked hot and dry as often as in gravy.

Odiyal kool is the peninsula's signature and the thing to order if you order one thing. It is a substantial seafood broth — crab, prawn, cuttlefish, fish, often with jackfruit seeds and greens — thickened with odiyal flour, which is made from dried palmyra root. Nothing else in Sri Lanka tastes like it, and it comes directly out of the palmyra landscape you have been driving through.

Alongside the seafood there is a deep vegetarian tradition, particularly around the temples: rice and several curries served on a banana leaf, drumstick and brinjal and long beans, sambols, and the crisp fried appalam that goes with everything. Breakfast is idiyappam, the fine steamed string hoppers, or pittu, steamed cylinders of ground rice and coconut, eaten with sothi, a mild coconut gravy, or with a fiery sambol. Ulundu vadai — dark, savoury lentil doughnuts — are the standard morning snack with tea.

Then there is the palmyra itself, which reaches the table in several forms. Panangkatti is palmyra jaggery, dark and mineral and quite different from the kithul treacle of the south. Nungu is the translucent, jelly-like young fruit, sold at the roadside in the season and eaten cold. Toddy is tapped from the flowering stem and fermented, and it is a working man's drink of the north rather than a tourist novelty.

Finally, and unexpectedly, Jaffna has a serious sweet tooth and a culture of cool bars — small places selling ice cream, falooda in tall glasses, and fruit crushes, of which nelli, the sour Indian gooseberry, is the local one to try. And in season, the peninsula's mangoes, particularly the variety known as Karutha Colomban, are the ones Sri Lankans will drive a long way for.

The palmyra landscape

You will have started noticing them somewhere north of Vavuniya and by the time you reach the peninsula they define everything you can see. The palmyra — panai in Tamil — is to the north what the coconut is to the south-west, and the comparison is more than decorative. It is the reason human life works here.

The tree is unmistakable: a straight, dark, unbranching trunk, ringed with old leaf scars, topped by a stiff fan of leaves that rattles in the wind rather than rustling. They grow in loose stands rather than plantations, and they tolerate salt, drought and thin limestone soil that would defeat almost anything else.

Every part of the tree is used. The timber makes rafters and fence posts and the roof frames of houses. The leaves thatch, and are woven into baskets, mats, fans and the long-lasting boxes still used to store documents. The sap is tapped for toddy and boiled down for jaggery. The young fruit is eaten fresh, the mature fruit pulped, and the germinated root dried and ground into the odiyal flour that thickens kool. A palmyra grove is not scenery here; it is infrastructure.

It is also what makes the north look and feel like nowhere else in the country. The light is harder because there is less canopy. The horizon is further away because the land is flat and the trees are vertical rather than spreading. Late in the afternoon a stand of palmyra against a low sun does something to the landscape that photographs never quite capture, which is as good a reason as any to be on the road at that hour rather than in a hotel.

Travelling with children on a seven-hour drive

Seven hours is a long time for an adult and a very long time for a small child, and there is no arrangement that makes it short. There are, however, arrangements that make it work.

The first and best is to split it. With children under about eight, the overnight halt at Anuradhapura stops being a nice idea and becomes the sensible plan: three or four hours of driving, a swim, a night in a bed, and a shorter run the following morning. The sacred city also gives children space to run about, which is not true of a car.

The second is to take the train, which is straightforwardly easier with children than a car is. They can walk about, look out of an open door with an adult holding on, sleep flat on a night service, and eat when they are hungry rather than when the driver finds somewhere to stop.

If you are driving it in one go, a few things help. Leave at dawn, so the first hours are slept through. Ask for a larger vehicle than the head count strictly requires, because space is the whole battle on a long drive. Stop every couple of hours whether or not anyone has asked, at Anuradhapura and Vavuniya for preference, where the facilities are better than at the roadside. Carry more water and more snacks than seems reasonable. Bring whatever screen keeps the peace at home and do not feel obliged to justify it.

Child seats can generally be arranged if they are requested at the time of booking rather than mentioned on the day, and it is worth confirming the size and the number when you book. Anyone prone to motion sickness should sit forward, look at the horizon and take whatever they normally take before setting off rather than after the first bad half-hour; the A9 is straight, which helps a great deal compared with any hill road.

Luggage

Luggage matters more on this route than on a short transfer, for the obvious reason that seven hours with a case on your knees is a genuinely miserable way to see a country.

Count honestly when you book: passengers, large cases, cabin bags, and anything awkward such as golf clubs, a surfboard, a wheelchair or camera cases that will not go in a boot. A saloon car is fine for two people with two cases. Three or four people with full-sized luggage want a van, and on a drive of this length the van is worth it even if the numbers just about fit the smaller vehicle.

Say if you are carrying anything that should not travel in a hot boot for seven hours — medicines that need to stay cool, film, delicate instruments — so that it can be stowed in the cabin from the start rather than rearranged at the first stop.

If you are combining transport — flying or taking the train one way and driving the other — think about allowances before you pack rather than at the check-in desk. Light aircraft and trains are both less forgiving of a large case than a car is, and the car is the only one of the three that does not care how much you have brought.

Timing: why leaving early matters more here

On a two-hour transfer the departure time is a preference. On this one it determines the character of the whole day, and it is the single piece of advice on this page that is worth acting on above all the others.

Leave at first light and the drive is transformed. The roads around Colombo are empty, the towns on the way north have not woken up, the first two hours cost you almost nothing, and you cross the northern plain in the cool part of the morning. You reach Anuradhapura for a proper breakfast, Vavuniya by the middle of the day, and Jaffna in the afternoon with light left in the sky and time to walk down to the fort before dinner.

Leave at ten and every one of those things moves against you. You meet the towns at their busiest, you cross the plain in the heat, you stop for lunch when you would rather be driving, and you arrive after dark in a city you do not know, at the end of a day that started at an airport.

This is why the pre-dawn arrival, which feels like the worst possible flight time when you book it, is actually the best one for this route. You land at four in the morning, you are on the road by five, and you have effectively been given the early start for nothing.

Arriving after dark is not dangerous, it is simply harder work: unfamiliar addresses in a flat city of similar-looking streets take longer to find at night, and the last half-hour of a seven-hour drive is the wrong time to be telephoning a guesthouse for directions. If you know you will be arriving late, give us the exact name of the property, spelt out, and a telephone number for it, and the difference is usually solved before it becomes a problem.

Two smaller timing points. Rain on the northern plain in the north-east monsoon months can be heavy and it slows the road; allow for it rather than planning to the minute. And if your dates fall over the Nallur festival, the streets around the temple are closed and the city is full, which is worth knowing before you book a room on the wrong side of it.

The return leg

Coming south is not quite the mirror image of coming north, and the fact pack figure reflects it: the run from Jaffna back to Colombo is around 400 kilometres and about 450 minutes — seven and a half hours — because the destination is the city itself rather than the airport on its northern edge, and the last hour is spent getting into Colombo rather than skirting it.

That last hour is the part to plan around. Colombo's traffic is at its worst in the late afternoon and early evening, which is precisely when a car that left Jaffna after breakfast will arrive. If the day ends with a flight, build in a generous margin — considerably more than you would think necessary — and consider leaving Jaffna earlier than feels sociable.

Better still, break the return as well. A night at Anuradhapura on the way south, or a couple of nights in the Cultural Triangle, converts a hard driving day into two easy ones and puts something worth seeing in the middle of it. If your flight is an early morning departure, an overnight near the airport at the end of it is worth far more than the hours it costs.

The train works well southbound too, and the overnight service in particular suits travellers who want their last full day in Jaffna rather than on a road. The same caveat applies as northbound: sleeping accommodation books out early and the timetable should be checked close to the day.

Where people go on from Jaffna

The peninsula is usually the far end of an itinerary rather than a crossroads, and most journeys from here run back down the A9 in one form or another.

Colombo is the standard move, and the figures are above: 400 kilometres and about 450 minutes. Treat it as a full travelling day, not a morning, and break it if you have the time.

Anuradhapura is the natural first stop southbound and the one that makes the most of the road you have to drive anyway. Two nights there on the way back turns the return into the historical half of the trip rather than the tedious half.

Trincomalee, on the east coast, is the other direction people take from the north, cutting across the mainland rather than going all the way south before turning. It is a good combination — the northern peninsula and then the east coast beaches — and it avoids retracing the whole length of the A9.

Whichever of these you are doing, a multi-day booking is usually the right shape rather than a series of separate transfers. The same car and driver throughout means your luggage stays where it is between stops, the early starts are agreed in advance rather than requested at reception, and nobody has to find an unfamiliar address for the first time twice.

How to book, and what to tell us

The fares shown above this article are per vehicle rather than per person and are fixed at the time of booking, so the figure you see is the figure you pay whatever the road does on the day. On a seven-hour journey that certainty is worth more than it is on a short one.

What genuinely helps us when you book this route:

• Your flight number, which is more use than a landing time.
• Whether you are driving it in one day or two, and if two, where you intend to stop. This changes the vehicle, the driver's own arrangements and the shape of the quote.
• The exact name of your property in Jaffna, spelt out, with a telephone number if you have one.
• Passengers and cases, honestly counted. Space is the whole question on a drive this long.
• Whether you want a Tamil-speaking driver, which on this route is worth asking for.
• Any stop you want on the way — Anuradhapura for a couple of hours, a break at Vavuniya, a look at Elephant Pass — agreed before departure rather than negotiated at a junction.
• Child seats, with ages, at the time of booking rather than on the day.

A one-way transfer from the airport is booked at book a taxi. For the days you are actually on the peninsula — the causeway to Kayts and Karainagar, the run up to Point Pedro and Keerimalai, a morning at Nallur and an afternoon at the fort — a day hire is the right arrangement, because those are days with many short stops and long waits rather than journeys from one place to another. And if Jaffna is one chapter of a longer trip that comes back down through Anuradhapura and the Cultural Triangle, a multi-day booking keeps one car and one driver from the airport to the airport.

What to carry away from this page is the arithmetic and what follows from it. Three hundred and seventy-four kilometres, seven hours, a good road through a country that changes completely from end to end. Leave early or split it in two. Take the train if the train suits you better, and fly if the calendar demands it. Then keep a car once you are there, because the peninsula is wider than the city, and the causeways, the palmyra roads and the northern shore are the reason you came this far in the first place.