If excursions are booked seperatly without transportation and/or hotels, this offer is not covered by the STO Garant guarantee. You can find the conditions for this guarantee scheme on STO Garant’s website (www.sto-garant.nl/de/downloads).
Trincomalee
Trincomalee (Trinco) sits on one the world’s finest natural harbours. This historic city is old almost beyond reckoning: it’s possibly the site of historic Gokana in the Mahavamsa, and its Shiva temple the site of Trikuta Hill in the Hindu text Vayu Purana. Trincomalee’s superb deep water port has made it the target for all manner of attacks over the centuries: by the British takeover in 1795, the city had changed colonial hands seven times. It’s easy to spend a day or more exploring the ins and outs of the myriad waterfronts and the fort and its famous temple.
Passikudah Beach
These spectacular back-to-back beaches, 34km north of Batticaloa, present as stark and confusing a juxtaposition as you could imagine. At the northern tip of the peninsula on a tightly enclosed bay, the breathtaking white sands of sickle-shaped Passekudah beach are being developed as a kind of mini-Cancun, a government driven ‘Special Economic Zone’ with oodles of luxury hotels planned to ring the bay.
Pigeon Island National Park
Floating in the great blue 1km offshore, Pigeon Island, with its powdery white sands and glittering coral gardens, tantalises with possibilities. A nesting area for rock pigeons, the island is beautiful enough, with rock pools and paths running through thickets, but it’s the underwater landscape that’s the real star. The reef here is shallow, making snorkelling almost as satisfying as diving, and it’s home to dozens of corals, hundreds of reef fish (including blacktip reef sharks) and turtles.