A seventh-century reservoir on the road to the east coast, big enough to lose the far shore in haze. A good stop on the way to Trincomalee rather than a destination in itself.
Kantale Wewa was built in the seventh century and is one of the largest of the ancient tanks, part of the same extraordinary irrigation network that made settlement possible across the dry zone. The bund runs for kilometres and the water disappears into haze at the far end.
There is not a great deal to do here in the organised sense, and that is the appeal. You stop on the bund, and the birdlife does the rest: pelicans, painted storks, spoonbills, open-billed storks working the shallows in numbers, and cormorants on every dead branch. Water buffalo stand in the margins looking unimpressed.
It sits directly on the road between here and Trincomalee, which is what makes it worth building into a day. Break the drive, spend forty minutes on the bund with binoculars, and carry on to the coast.
