Nilaveli Beach

Nilaveli is north of Trincomalee, on Sri Lanka's north-east coast, four kilometres of pale sand facing the Bay of Bengal with Pigeon Island a kilometre offshore. It is the principal beach of a coast that operates on the opposite calendar to the rest of the country.

The two-monsoon system is the whole point. The south and west coasts work from December to April; from May to September those coasts are closed by wind and swell while the east — Nilaveli, Uppuveli, Arugam Bay — is flat, dry and warm. Visitors who arrive in Sri Lanka in July and go south find a shut coast; the answer was always here.

The beach is broad, shallow-sloping and calm in season, with water that stays waist-deep a long way out. Pigeon Island National Park offshore holds one of the better-preserved coral reefs in the country and blacktip reef sharks in the shallows; access is by boat with a park ticket, and the reef has suffered from bleaching and from visitor pressure, with numbers now managed.

Development is low and spread out. The east coast was inaccessible during the civil war, which ended in 2009, and the tourism here is consequently recent and thin: a scattering of hotels and guesthouses, no strip, and long stretches of empty sand between them. Uppuveli, twenty minutes south toward Trincomalee, is the smaller and busier of the pair, and Marble Beach beyond it sits inside an air force property with public access — a legacy of the war years that has become an ordinary arrangement.

The east coast works from May to September while the south and west are shut, which is the single most useful thing to know about Sri Lanka and the thing most visitors get wrong. Pigeon Island offshore is a national park with blacktip reef sharks in the shallows, a boat and a ticket away.