The A9 is the mother road, connecting north to south. From Omanthai, however, it’s one big construction site. Rumbly, one lane in parts, severe delays. The impasse you see above happens like every few kilometers, they shut one lane down to pave it and all the cars have to wait and go single file. Cars is perhaps a misnomer. On one stretch I counted and there were 21 construction/industrial vehicles for every 12 that could be considered civilian transport. The A9 is under construction, which is good. It just means that right now, travelling on the A9 is very bad.
What you see above is the normal single file traffic thing, except here you can actually see the end. There are stretches where they’ve shut down a lane for almost a kilometer. You’re waiting and you can’t see any traffic there, just a guy is a safety vest holding a STOP sign. Then about 20 trucks rumble through.
The amount of construction vehicles is insane. There are literally thousands of dump trucks, lorries, CATs, etc. They’re redoing the rail line on one side, so there’s piles of gravel, shining in the sun. The road it self is being retarred, they’re moving earth, things are happening. It’s just that right now, driving on the A9 really sucks. We were in a decent jeep but my back still hurts. It also takes a hideous amount of time, you spend at least an hour waiting. Right now the A9 is getting worse before it gets better. So I wouldn’t actually recommended taking it right now. Perhaps on the overnight bus with a hefty dose of Xanax.
Just bear in mind that the road from Omanthai is a bit like the reconciliation process. Work in progress.
You should have tried going to mulative via Mankulam. :)
Are Sri Lankans building this? It looks like it. Because if it was left to the Chinese things would be far more efficient and quicker, and road would have been ready in half the time it would take Sri Lankans to get it done.
As far as I can remember since the end of war, this stretch has been under construction. I was told due to poor quality construction the previous roads break down during heavy rains. Hopefully this time they are building a better quality than patch job.
Get the Chinese to do it. Sri Lankans are lazy, incompetent and corrupt losers compared to them.
Nah, just get the Army to build it, cheaper than the Chinese.
But then we would be inundated with screams and shouts from NGOs and various other parties about how the military is taking over everything in the north and how anything that moves is living in morbid fear of getting raped and killed. And how the Sinhalese are “colonising” the north, and Tamils are being ethnically cleansed and so on and so forth.
The srmy would do a superb job. They are the most efficient and would save the gov tons of $. But hey…what matters is what the people think in the big bad diaspora right? Like the nut cases in slwb fb page.
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