Hotels – and indeed, tourists – are even rarer in the sunny, sleepy islands beyond Jaffna, reached by causeway and free ferry, but the intrepid traveller will find a ready welcome from people cut off from the west for a generation.
Just over Elephant Pass causeway is a memorial to the self-sacrifice of a Sri Lankan army officer.
The 47km causeway across the 10-island archipelago west of Jaffna is still partly ruined, so catching an early ferry to the remotest of these sunny islands means an early start.
War closed both this causeway road, from Jaffna to Pungudutivu island, and the passenger ferry we take to Delft (an island colonised by Portuguese but renamed by Dutch settlers), so these islanders were particularly isolated.
Worse, the army appeared to have gained nothing from it.It had apparently aimed to capture the town of Pallai as a prelude to retaking the more important Elephant Pass, a causeway linking the Jaffna peninsula to the southern mainland.
Under Mr Martinelli, Panama City received a new metro, a giant causeway around the old part of town and a jungle of new skyscrapers.
Once relatively free of sectarian animosity, Bahrain has allowed the fiercely anti-Shia feeling expressed in Saudi ruling circles to cross the causeway that connects it with its much bigger neighbour.
They would rather, they say, stay put and carry on farming provided local services are improved— than return to a rehabilitated marsh.A few kilometres south of al-Naser, a second group of Shaghanba have clung stubbornly to a causeway in the face of Saddam's depredations, and suffered accordingly.
Flashy cars stream across the causeway towards Bahrain and its nightlife.
It also does a tidy business as a tourist destination for Saudis, who can drive across a causeway to soak up pleasures forbidden at home.An open secretBut the Gulf's most dynamic and diverse economy, and the model that its neighbours increasingly turn to, is the tiny city-state of Dubai.
As the case drags on at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Bahrain has said it intends to develop the islands, building a runway, a hotel and a 22-kilometre (14-mile) causeway to Bahrain.
