Taxi from Colombo Airport (CMB) to Trincomalee

Almost every other beach transfer from Colombo airport runs along the island. This one runs across it. The road to Bentota or Mirissa hugs the western and southern edge and rarely loses sight of the sea; the road to Trincomalee turns inland at the top of Colombo, crosses the whole dry-zone plain, passes the ancient capitals on the way, and only meets salt water again at the very end, some two hundred and forty-five kilometres later on the far coast.

That single geographical fact governs everything else on this page. It is why the journey takes about five hours. It is why breaking it makes more sense here than on any other airport run in the country. And it is why the weather at the end is not the weather you left behind at the start, which is the most important and most frequently misunderstood thing about the east coast of Sri Lanka.

The journey at a glance

The bare figures first, because they set the shape of the day.

• Distance: around 245 km by road from Bandaranaike International Airport at Katunayake to Trincomalee.
• Time: about 300 minutes — five hours — in ordinary conditions, door to door.
• Shape of the drive: expressway from Katunayake to the northern edge of Colombo, then inland and north through coconut country, then a long run across the dry-zone plain by way of Dambulla and Habarana, then east through Kantale to the coast.
• Direction of travel: you never enter Colombo. The route clips the northern fringe of the city and turns away from it, which is the only reason a journey of this length is five hours rather than six.
• The road is mostly open. The surface is good for the great majority of it and the traffic thins markedly once you are clear of the suburbs. This is a long drive rather than a hard one.
• The Cultural Triangle sits directly on the route. Dambulla, Sigiriya, Habarana and the elephant parks are not detours from this road. They are on it.
• The season is the opposite of the west coast's. Broadly May to September on the east, when the south-west is under monsoon. Get this wrong and nothing else on this page will help you.
• Trincomalee is not one place. The town, Uppuveli and Nilaveli are separate, and a booking that says only Trincomalee can mean any of the three.

Five hours is a realistic figure rather than an optimistic one. It can be a shade quicker on a pre-dawn run, when the towns on the way north are still shut and the road belongs to lorries and bakery vans. It stretches on a wet afternoon, on a resurfaced stretch, or if you stop properly for lunch — and on this route you probably should. What it does not do is collapse to the three hours the distance might suggest, because a good deal of the route is ordinary two-lane road through places where people live and cross without looking.

Across the island rather than along it

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 predictably, and it does a useful amount of the early work. Three lanes, few junctions, nothing much to look at. Most people sleep through it and there is no reason not to. The old road through Ja-Ela and Wattala is still used when the expressway is closed, but it runs through the middle of every town on the way and takes very much longer.

The car leaves the expressway on the northern fringe of the city and turns inland rather than continuing south into it. This is the least agreeable part of the day: a few kilometres of dense suburban traffic through Peliyagoda and Kadawatha where buses stop without warning and three-wheelers fill every gap. It thins out. By the time the road settles into its northward run you have done the worst of the driving and the least of the distance, which is the honest shape of this transfer.

Coconut country and Kurunegala

North and east of the airport the land is one enormous coconut plantation. The region between Gampaha, Kurunegala and Puttalam is known locally as the coconut triangle because it grows most of the island's crop, and for a long stretch the view is rank after rank of palms in disciplined rows with the ground between them swept bare and brown. It is a working landscape rather than a scenic one, and the evidence lines the road: husks stacked for coir, shells burnt for charcoal, mats of copra drying on concrete, and stands selling king coconut, the orange ones, drunk cold from the shell.

Kurunegala is the largest town on the route and the point at which the landscape announces that something is changing. It sits at the foot of enormous bare rock outcrops standing straight out of the plain, the largest called Ethagala, the elephant rock, because that is very much what it resembles from below. Those domes are ancient granite, the worn-down cores of a far older mountain range left standing when everything softer eroded away, and you will see them repeatedly from here on. Sigiriya, which you pass, is the most theatrical of them all.

The change into the dry zone

Somewhere north of Kurunegala the country changes, and it is one of the more satisfying transitions on the island because you can watch it happen through the window. The coconut thins out. The green goes from a wet, glossy green to a harder, greyer, more olive one. Palmyra and tamarind appear. The soil turns from red laterite to something paler and dustier. The hills flatten into a plain with isolated rock domes standing on it, and the sky gets a great deal bigger.

This is the dry zone, and the line between it and the wet zone of the south-west is a genuine climatic boundary rather than a figure of speech. Almost all the rest of this drive happens inside it, and the eastern half of the island is thorn scrub, tank bunds, palmyra and heat rather than tea and jungle.

The tanks

The other thing that arrives with the dry zone is water, which sounds like a contradiction until you understand what you are looking at. This plain has been farmed for well over two thousand years, and it has been farmed by storing the short, violent rains of one season to grow rice through the next. The results are the tanks: reservoirs made by throwing a long earth bund across a shallow valley, some small enough to serve one village and some the size of a lake.

Once you know the shape you cannot stop seeing it. A raised earth bank running dead level across the landscape with trees along the top of it, a sheet of water behind, and below the bund a staircase of paddy taking the water down. Egrets in the shallows, buffalo standing chest-deep in the afternoon heat, lotus over whole bays of the bigger ones. The system was built and rebuilt by the kings whose ruined capitals sit either side of this road, and a great deal of it is still doing the job it was built for. It also explains the birds, because the water here is concentrated into a few thousand artificial lakes.

Dambulla, Habarana and the turn east

Dambulla is where the roads meet. It is the junction town of the whole Cultural Triangle: the road from Colombo arrives from the south-west, the road up from Kandy arrives from the south, and the roads to Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Trincomalee and Jaffna all leave from here. There is an enormous wholesale vegetable market on the edge of it that works through the night, and if you pass in the small hours you will see lorries stacked with cabbages and leeks brought down from the hill country. Above the town, in a rock outcrop, are the painted cave temples that most visitors stop for.

From Dambulla the road runs north-east to Habarana, and Habarana is the second junction that matters. It is barely a town — a crossroads with hotels, a filling station, a few places to eat, and elephants in the national parks all around it. Here the Trincomalee road turns properly east, and from that point you are heading for the coast rather than across the island. Some drivers describe this route as going via Dambulla and some as going via Habarana; they are describing the same road at two different points on it. East of Habarana the traffic thins, the towns get smaller and further apart, and the driving becomes the easiest of the day.

Kantale, and the run down to the sea

The last part crosses the top of the Eastern Province through Kantale, and Kantale is worth looking up from your phone for. Its tank is one of the great ancient reservoirs of the dry zone, a very large sheet of water held behind a long earth bund, and the road runs close enough to give you the scale of it. Around it is sugar cane, paddy and a landscape that feels emptier than anything since the airport.

After Kantale the country dries further, palmyra becomes common along the verges, and the vegetation takes on the thorny, silver-grey look of a coast that gets its rain in a short concentrated season and then does without. You pass salt flats. Then, without much ceremony, the road reaches the inner harbour at China Bay, the water appears on your right, and you understand why this place has the reputation it has. The final approach runs along the edge of that water past the airfield, harbour on one side, low hills on the other, and fishing boats drawn up wherever there is a beach to draw them up on. It is one of the better arrivals in the country and worth being awake for.

Why breaking this journey is unusually sensible here

On most airport transfers, stopping on the way is an indulgence. On this one it is close to the obvious course of action, and the reason is simply that the Cultural Triangle lies on the road rather than beside it. Dambulla and its cave temples are on the route. The Sigiriya turning is on the route. Habarana, the base for Minneriya, Kaudulla and Hurulu Eco Park, is on the route. Polonnaruwa is a modest distance off it. None of these is a diversion in any meaningful sense; they are places you pass whether you stop or not.

That opens two quite different ways of doing this transfer, and it is worth deciding which you want before you book rather than in the car.

The straight run

The first is simply to drive it: five hours, one proper stop for food and a lavatory, and the beach by the afternoon. This is right if you have landed in the morning, if you are travelling with small children who will do better with one long car journey than with a day of getting in and out, or if your holiday is a beach holiday and the Triangle is not part of the plan. Take the coconut early and the meal around Dambulla or Habarana.

The broken journey

The second is to treat the drive as two days, sleeping a night at Dambulla, Sigiriya or Habarana and coming on to the coast the following afternoon. This costs nothing in distance, because you sleep on the road you were driving anyway, and it converts the most tiring part of a trip into the part where you see the cave temples or climb a rock at first light.

There is a practical argument beyond the sightseeing. A night flight followed by five hours in a car is a great deal to ask of anybody, and the people who find the east coast disappointing are quite often the people who arrived at it exhausted. Splitting the journey means you reach the sea rested, which is the state in which a quiet beach is at its best. Say so at the point of booking rather than on the day: a multi-day booking is the usual answer, and it has the incidental advantage that your luggage stays in the boot rather than being unloaded and reloaded twice.

One further point in favour. The parks at Minneriya and Kaudulla hold large numbers of elephants through the drier months, and an afternoon safari from Habarana slots into a Trincomalee transfer more neatly than into almost any other itinerary. What does not work is bolting one onto a straight-through transfer as an afterthought, because safaris happen at the ends of the day and transfers happen in the middle of 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 your driver outside the terminal building is entirely normal here and not a sign that something has gone wrong. Walk out, and look for your name. Flights from Europe and the Gulf land in a cluster before dawn, which is the one time of day the road north is genuinely clear.

Give the flight number when you book

This matters more than the landing time. A driver who has your flight number can see that you are two hours late in the air and will still be there when you come out; a driver who has only a clock time is working to a booked hour and has no way of knowing whether you are delayed, diverted or simply slow through immigration. On a five-hour transfer that difference is worth more than any other detail you can supply.

Name the beach, not just the town

This is the single most useful thing you can do when booking this particular route, and the next section explains why. The town and the beaches north of it at Uppuveli and Nilaveli are a real distance apart, and a booking that says only Trincomalee can mean any of them. Give the property name, the beach name and a telephone number for the hotel if you have one.

Trincomalee, Uppuveli, Nilaveli: the distinction that matters

More confusion attaches to this than to anything else on the route, so it is worth being blunt. When most visitors say they are going to Trincomalee, they do not mean Trincomalee. They mean a beach some way north of it.

The town

Trincomalee proper is a working port city on a peninsula between the sea and one of the world's great natural harbours. It has a fort, a famous temple on a cliff, a busy fish market, kovils and mosques and churches within a few streets of each other, and the ordinary unglamorous business of a provincial capital. It is a genuinely interesting place to spend a few hours and rewarding to walk around in the cool of the early evening. It is not a resort, and the harbour side is a working port rather than a promenade. People do stay in town, but if you have booked a beach holiday and find yourself in a hotel in town, something went wrong at the booking stage rather than the driving stage.

Uppuveli

Uppuveli is the nearer of the two beach villages, a short run north of the town along the coast road. It is compact: a strip of sand, a road behind it, guesthouses and small hotels and a handful of places to eat, most within walking distance of each other. There is a village around it that does other things besides tourism, and the fishing boats still work off the beach. Uppuveli suits people who want to be able to walk somewhere in the evening, who like a bit of company on a beach, and who may want to go into town without making an expedition of it. It is the easier of the two for a short stay and the easier if you have not arranged a car for the days you are there.

Nilaveli

Nilaveli is further north again and a different proposition. The beach is longer, wider and considerably emptier, backed in places by casuarina and scrub rather than by a village, and the accommodation is spread thinly along several kilometres of it rather than concentrated in one strip. Some of the larger hotels on this coast are here; so are places with four rooms and a generator. Nilaveli suits people who want space and quiet and are content to eat where they are staying, and it is the natural base for Pigeon Island, which lies directly offshore. What it does not suit is somebody who wants to wander out after dinner and find three restaurants to choose from. Between properties you will want a vehicle or a three-wheeler, and after dark the road is dark.

What this means in practice

• Give the beach name when you book. A driver who knows he is going to Nilaveli takes a different turning from one who thinks he is going to the town, and correcting it at the end of a five-hour drive is an irritation nobody needs.
• Do not assume you can walk between them. Uppuveli and Nilaveli are separate villages with real distance between them, and Nilaveli is itself strung out along the coast. Getting from one to the other is a journey, not a stroll.
• Decide whether you want a car while you are there. If you are at the quiet end of Nilaveli and intend to see the temple, the fort and the town, a day hire for one of your days is a far better arrangement than negotiating individual runs.

The harbour, and why it has always mattered

Trincomalee exists because of its harbour, and the harbour is not an ordinary one. It is a very large, very deep natural inlet, sheltered on almost every side by land, deep enough close inshore to take large ships without dredging, and usable through weather that would close other anchorages on this coast. There are only a handful of natural harbours of this quality anywhere, and this one sits on the sea route between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

That combination has made the place consequential for a very long time. It was known to Indian Ocean traders and to the classical geographers of the Mediterranean world, and it was a Tamil port with an ancient temple above it. From the sixteenth century onwards it was taken, fortified, lost and retaken by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the British in turn, each of whom understood that whoever held this inlet had the best sheltered deep water for a very long way in either direction. The British made it the principal eastern base of their fleet into the twentieth century.

You can see the logic from Swami Rock without anybody explaining it. The land curls round, the water inside is dark and still, and the sea outside is a different colour. Whatever else Trincomalee is, it is first of all a harbour with a town attached. It remains a working harbour in commercial and naval use, which is worth knowing so that you set expectations correctly: this is infrastructure rather than a view laid on for visitors.

Why the coast is quieter than the south

Visitors often remark that the east feels a generation behind the south-west in the amount of building along its beaches, and ask why. The straightforward answer is that tourism arrived here much later. The east coast was affected both by the country's long civil conflict, which ended in 2009, and by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and through much of the period when the south and west coasts were being developed continuously, this coast was not. Rebuilding and tourism have both come since.

The relevance to a traveller is simply this: the infrastructure is newer and thinner than in the south, and the places you stay are more likely to be small and family-run. The coast is best approached as somewhere getting on with its own life rather than as a resort strip — which is precisely what most people who like it here like about it.

Koneswaram and Fort Frederick

If you do one thing in the town, this is it, and the two are the same excursion because the temple stands inside the fort.

Fort Frederick

The fort occupies the neck of the headland east of the town. The Portuguese built the first works here, the Dutch rebuilt them, and the British took the place and gave it the name it still carries. You enter through a gateway with old carved arms above it and find yourself on a shaded road climbing gently through what feels more like a wooded park than a fortification, because that is largely what it has become. Spotted deer live inside the fort and wander the road and the verges in numbers, entirely untroubled by traffic. Among the trees are colonial-era buildings still in use, including one that tradition holds was occupied for a time by the young Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, before an illness kept him from sailing onward.

Swami Rock and the temple

The road through the fort climbs to Swami Rock, a cliff of dark stone dropping sheer into the sea at the end of the headland, and on top of it stands Koneswaram. This is one of the most important Shiva temples in the country, a place of pilgrimage of great antiquity, and its position is the whole point of it: a temple on the highest cliff above the finest harbour on the coast, facing the sunrise, visible from the sea.

The present temple is not the ancient one. The medieval temple that stood here was destroyed in the early seventeenth century and its stone reused in the fort below; what you visit today is a twentieth-century rebuilding on the same site. Some of the older sculpture was recovered from the sea beneath the rock in the twentieth century and returned to the temple, which is a detail worth carrying up the hill with you, because it changes how the drop below looks from the parapet.

The temple is colourful, busy and active, with a tall painted gopuram, a large Shiva figure visible from a distance and a steady traffic of worshippers. Ordinary temple courtesies apply: shoes off before the inner precincts, shoulders and knees covered, and discretion with the camera around people who are there to pray. The point on the cliff edge is called Lover's Leap, and from the parapet you look straight down a great deal of dark rock into clear water, out to sea on one side and back across the harbour on the other. Early morning is the best hour: the light is behind you, the heat is bearable and the temple is at its most active.

The rest of the town

Below the fort the town rewards an unhurried hour. There is a large Kali temple, distinct in style from Koneswaram and busy in the evenings, and a fish market at its best very early. Dutch Bay curves along the town's own seafront and fills in the late afternoon with people out for the air, children in the shallows and vendors working the sand; it functions as the town's promenade rather than as a bathing beach in the way Nilaveli does.

The season, which is the thing to get right

If you read nothing else on this page, read this. Sri Lanka does not have one holiday season. It has two, in different halves of the island, and they are roughly opposite one another.

The south-west monsoon brings rain to the west and south coasts through roughly May to September. The north-east monsoon brings rain to the east and north through roughly November to February. The practical result is that the season on the east coast is broadly May to September — precisely the period when Bentota, Hikkaduwa and Mirissa are at their wettest and roughest — and that the eastern beaches are at their least appealing over the European Christmas and New Year, which is exactly when most people assume Sri Lanka is at its best.

This catches out a great many visitors, including some who have been to Sri Lanka before and are working from the wrong half of the country. Booking a December beach week at Nilaveli because a friend loved Sri Lanka in December is a real and common mistake, and the friend was almost certainly in Mirissa.

• Roughly May to September. The east coast season. The sea is at its calmest and clearest, the Pigeon Island boats run, the whale and dolphin trips run, and it is hot and bright. This is when the beaches are worth the five-hour drive, and it is also when the south coast is not at its best, which is why an east-coast trip is such a sensible answer to a summer holiday in Sri Lanka.
• Roughly November to February. The wet months here. Rain comes in earnest, the sea is rougher, boat trips are limited or do not run, and some smaller properties close. The countryside inland is green and beautiful and the Cultural Triangle is perfectly enjoyable, but the beach holiday is not.
• The shoulders, roughly March to April and October. Transitional and less predictable. April in particular can be excellent and the sea often settles early; October is the reverse and generally deteriorating. On these edges it is worth asking what the sea has actually been doing lately rather than relying on a chart.

Two riders. Monsoons are patterns rather than timetables, and any given year can start late or finish early. And the drive itself is not seasonal in the same way. If you are going east in the wrong season for the beach, go for the harbour, the temple and the Triangle, and adjust the expectation rather than cancel the trip.

Pigeon Island and snorkelling

Pigeon Island lies offshore from Nilaveli and is a national park, which means there is a ticket, a park office and rules. Boats go out from the beach at Nilaveli, the crossing is short, and the island is small: a rocky outcrop with a beach on the landward side, a fringing coral reef, and a second smaller island beside it.

The attraction is the reef in the shallows. In good conditions the water is clear enough that snorkelling straight off the beach is genuinely rewarding, with reef fish in numbers, occasional turtles and blacktip reef sharks in the shallow water inside the reef. The sharks cause a certain amount of consternation among people who have not been told about them beforehand; they are small, they are the reef's own residents, and they are one of the things people come here for.

Being honest about the reef

Pigeon Island is a small reef with a great many visitors, and it has not been left untouched by that. Reefs across the Indian Ocean have suffered repeated coral bleaching from unusually warm water, and this one has had its share. It also carries heavy visitor pressure in season, concentrated in a small area over a short number of hours each day, and physical damage from people standing on coral is a visible problem here rather than a theoretical one. None of that means it is not worth going. It means going in a way that does not add to it.

• Do not stand on the coral, ever. This is the single largest cause of damage. If you need to rest, swim back to the sand. If you are not a confident swimmer, wear a buoyancy aid so that you are never tempted to put a foot down.
• Keep your fins up and behind you. Most coral is broken by people who never noticed they had touched it. In shallow water over reef, fin from the hips with your legs high.
• Do not touch, hold or chase anything. Turtles in particular are followed and crowded relentlessly at busy sites. Keep your distance and let them surface in peace.
• Wear a rash vest rather than covering yourself in sunscreen. It works better in tropical sun in any case, and it keeps a good deal of chemistry out of a small enclosed body of water.
• Take nothing off the island. Not coral, not shells. It is a national park.
• Go early. The first boats out have the best light, the calmest water and the fewest people, which is better for the reef and substantially better for you.

If the sea is up or the visibility poor, be flexible rather than insistent. The reef is only interesting when you can see it.

Whales and dolphins off Trincomalee

The continental shelf runs close to the coast here, so deep water is reachable without a long crossing, and that is the reason this stretch has a reputation for large whales. Boats operate out of Trincomalee and Nilaveli in the eastern season, and blue whales and sperm whales are both known in these waters, along with spinner dolphins, which travel in large and lively groups.

What nobody can tell you honestly is what you will see. Whale watching is not an attraction with an opening time; it is a search for wild animals in open water, and blank mornings happen to everybody. Treat a trip as a morning at sea with a good chance of something rather than as a booking for a whale, and you will enjoy it however it turns out. Anybody who guarantees a sighting is telling you something they cannot know.

• Trips leave very early, well before breakfast, because the sea is calmest at dawn and the light is best. Arrange food the night before.
• The sea can be uncomfortable even in season once you are off the shelf. If you are prone to seasickness, take something before you board rather than after you feel it, and sit low and central.
• Bring a hat, water and something with sleeves. There is little shade on a small boat and the sun offshore is stronger than it feels.
• Choose an operator that keeps its distance and does not chase. Boats crowding and cutting across whales is a genuine problem at busy sites, and the better operators here hold back, cut engines and let the animals decide. Ask about it before you book; the answer tells you what sort of morning you are buying.
• Dolphins are usually encountered closer inshore than the whales, so a trip that finds no whales frequently finds dolphins.

Marble Beach and the southern side

Not everything on this coast is north of the town. Marble Beach lies on the southern side near China Bay, on the stretch you drove past on the way in, and it is quite different in character from Nilaveli. It is a small, sheltered, shallow bay backed by casuarina and other trees that come almost down to the sand, with calm water and a curve of beach that feels enclosed rather than open. The area is run by the air force, which maintains the facilities and charges an entrance fee, and it is kept notably tidy as a result.

It suits families with small children particularly well, because the water is shallow and calm and there is shade close to the sand, which is not true of most of Nilaveli. It also makes a sensible last stop before a long drive back, since it sits on the road out. It is a managed day-visit beach rather than a wild one, and those who want emptiness will prefer the north.

Kanniya, Velgam Vehera and the country behind the coast

Kanniya hot springs sit a short way out of Trincomalee on the Habarana road. There are seven small square wells inside a walled enclosure, each drawing warm water at a slightly different temperature, and visitors draw water with a bucket and pour it over themselves. It is a modest place rather than a spa, of considerable antiquity, and busy with local visitors at weekends. It is a brief curiosity that fits neatly into the drive in or the drive out.

Velgam Vehera is a ruined Buddhist monastic site north-west of the town, quiet and lightly visited, with inscriptions and stonework spread through the scrub, and it gets no crowds at all. Further afield, the stupa at Seruwila lies south of the harbour and is an old and important pilgrimage site. The point of mentioning these is that Trincomalee is not only a beach.

Choosing a vehicle, and luggage

Five hours is long enough that the car matters. On a short transfer you can put up with a tight boot and a hard seat; on this one you will notice both.

For two people with two cases, a saloon is comfortable and adequate, and nothing about this route demands a larger vehicle. The one thing worth checking is that the boot genuinely takes two large cases, because a saloon with a small boot means a case on the back seat for five hours. For four adults with luggage, or a family with children and the paraphernalia that comes with them, a van is the right call and the difference in comfort over five hours is considerable — room for the bags behind rather than beside you, and enough space that a sleeping child is not lying across somebody's lap.

Count your bags before you book, including the ones you do not think of as luggage. Beach holidays generate awkward items — a pushchair, a snorkelling bag, a board bought on the way. The vehicle is allocated on what you declare, and a transfer that starts with the boot lid being forced starts badly. Keep one small bag in the cabin with water, medication and chargers so the boot need not be opened at every stop, and if you are breaking the journey, pack a single overnight bag.

Travelling with children

Five hours is a long time in a car with children, and it is worth being realistic about that before committing to a beach on the far coast. The mitigating factors are real, though. The road is not winding, which matters enormously if anybody gets carsick — this is a flat, straight, dry-zone drive rather than a hill-country one, and far kinder on the stomach than the roads to Kandy or Ella. There are frequent places to stop, and the middle section has enough to look at that older children will not spend all of it on a screen.

• Break the journey if you can. Habarana or Sigiriya splits it neatly, and an elephant park in the late afternoon is a far better proposition for a child than the third hour of a car journey.
• Two proper stops rather than one heroic push. Getting out, walking about and eating something turns a five-hour drive into two manageable ones.
• Bring or request a car seat. Not every vehicle carries them, so ask when you book rather than assuming, and give the ages.
• Water, and more of it than you think. The dry zone in the middle of the day is hot and air conditioning dehydrates people quietly.
• Expect an early stop. Small children just off a long-haul flight often need to get out within the first hour, and a driver who has been warned will plan for it.

At the other end, the choice between the beaches is less finely balanced than it looks. Uppuveli is generally easier with children: things are closer together, there is somewhere to walk to in the evening, and you are nearer the town if you need a pharmacy. Nilaveli is quieter and emptier and better if what you want is space, but you will be more dependent on the hotel for everything. Marble Beach, with its calm shallow water and shade, makes a good day out for younger children and easier swimming than the open coast.

Timing, and arriving in daylight

A landing at four or five in the morning gives you the best version of this drive. The road north is empty, the suburbs are asleep, the sun comes up over the dry zone somewhere in the middle of the journey, and you reach the coast in the morning. The only difficulty is at the far end: arriving before midday with a room that is not ready until the afternoon is a long wait if you have not planned for it. Ask about early check-in, or build a stop into the drive so that you arrive later and having seen something.

A late-morning or midday landing is the awkward one. Five hours from a midday start puts you on the coast in the early evening, which is manageable but means the whole day goes on the road. This is the arrival for which breaking the journey is most obviously right: stop at Dambulla or Habarana, sleep, and come on to the sea the next morning with a whole day at the beach in front of you.

An evening landing means arriving in Trincomalee late at night. The driving is routine, but finding an unlit property along the Nilaveli road at midnight is markedly harder than finding it at three in the afternoon, so have the hotel's number to hand and tell them roughly when to expect you. Parts of this route also pass through country where elephants move at night, which is a reason to be unhurried rather than a reason to be alarmed. If your flight lands in the evening, consider not driving it that night at all: a night near the airport at Negombo, or at Dambulla, and a fresh start in the morning gives you a better first day.

Keeping a car while you are there

Trincomalee is one of the places where having a vehicle for a day or two changes what the stay contains, and this is mainly a function of the distances described earlier. If you are at Nilaveli and want to see Koneswaram, the fort, the market, Kanniya and Marble Beach, that is a day of driving with several stops and waits, which is exactly what a day hire is for. Arranging the same thing as four separate journeys leaves you waiting for a ride at each end.

Equally, if you are here for a week on the sand and intend to do nothing but swim, read and eat, you do not need a car at all. Uppuveli in particular works perfectly well on foot with the occasional three-wheeler. Where you are certain to want one is on any day that involves the town and the beaches both, or any day that goes inland.

The return leg

Going back to the airport is the same road and takes about the same time, and the arithmetic is what people get wrong. Take five hours for the drive, add three hours for an international check-in, and add a real margin on top, because the slow part of the return is the last part: the approach to the northern edge of Colombo in the morning, when everybody in the region is going to work. Work backwards from your check-in time honestly and you will arrive with time in hand; work backwards optimistically and you will spend the last hour watching the clock in traffic.

Two habits make the return easier. Book the airport run before the morning you need it, so that a driver who has your flight time can advise on the departure hour rather than being told one. And keep the same driver for the outbound and return where the itinerary allows, because somebody who has found your hotel once will find it again in the dark without a telephone call.

If you are ending in Colombo rather than flying straight out, note that Trincomalee to Colombo is around 260 kilometres and about 360 minutes — six hours, an hour longer than the airport run over largely the same ground, because the extra time is spent getting into the city rather than skirting it. If your flight is the following day, the airport transfer and the Colombo transfer are two different journeys, and it is worth being clear which one you want.

Where people go on from Trincomalee

Trincomalee sits at the end of a road, which makes it a natural finishing point. But it is not a cul-de-sac, and several onward moves come up repeatedly.

Anuradhapura

Trincomalee to Anuradhapura is around 105 kilometres and about 135 minutes, which makes it the shortest serious onward leg from here and a very natural next move. It runs west across the dry zone through country very like the last part of your arrival drive and delivers you to the oldest of the island's ancient capitals: an enormous site of stupas, monastic ruins and tanks, with the sacred bodhi tree at the centre of it. Beach and then ruins, in that order, is a well-worn shape for a Sri Lankan fortnight, and from Anuradhapura you are within reach of Sigiriya, Dambulla and Polonnaruwa without any long transfer.

Colombo, and the flight home

Trincomalee to Colombo is around 260 kilometres and about 360 minutes. This is the standard end-of-trip run for anybody with a night in the city before flying, and it retraces the arrival route as far as the outskirts before going in rather than round.

Down the east coast

The other direction people go is south, along the coast towards Batticaloa and, further on, Arugam Bay. This is worth knowing about because it is the one onward journey that keeps you inside the eastern season rather than taking you back into the wet half of the island, and because the east coast road is a genuinely interesting drive through lagoon country and fishing villages that very few visitors see. It is a full travelling day rather than a morning. The surfing season at Arugam Bay overlaps neatly with the Trincomalee season, which is why the two turn up in the same itineraries so often.

How to book, and what to tell us

The fares shown above this article are per vehicle rather than per person and are fixed when you book, so the figure you see is the figure you pay whatever the road does on the day. On a five-hour transfer across the island that certainty is worth having.

What genuinely helps when you book this route:

• Your flight number, which is far more useful than a landing time on a journey of this length.
• The beach, not just the town. Uppuveli, Nilaveli or Trincomalee town — and the exact name of the property, spelt out. This is the detail that matters most on this route.
• The hotel's telephone number, particularly for the Nilaveli road and particularly if you are arriving after dark.
• Passengers and cases, honestly counted, so that the vehicle is right the first time rather than at the second attempt.
• Whether you want to break the journey, and where — Dambulla, Sigiriya or Habarana — decided before departure rather than at the junction.
• Any stop you want on the way, such as the cave temple at Dambulla or a proper lunch at Habarana.
• Car seats and ages if you are travelling with small children.

A one-way airport transfer is booked at book a taxi. For the days you are on the coast — the fort and the temple and the market in one go, or Kanniya and Marble Beach, or a run inland — a day hire is the right shape, because those are days with several stops and waits rather than journeys from one place to another. And if Trincomalee is one chapter of a longer trip that takes in the Cultural Triangle on the way out or Anuradhapura on the way back, a multi-day booking keeps the same car and driver throughout, which means your luggage stays where it is, the early starts are agreed rather than requested, and nobody has to find your hotel for the first time twice.

The two things to carry away from this page are the season and the destination. Roughly May to September, the opposite of the south coast, and a beach name rather than a town name. Get those two right and the rest is a straightforward five-hour drive across an interesting island to one of the quietest good beaches left on it, with a great harbour, an old temple on a cliff and a reef offshore thrown in.