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I eat my fish buns; the ongoing curry fest has made me hungry. Fish buns consist of soft, white, triangular-shaped bread in the centre of which a spicy potato and fish concoction is to be found. They are tasty and I could see them catching on back home. Afterwards, I take a walk along the carriages. I count seven including a dining carriage with an empty kiosk and no food for sale. It seems the idea is that passengers bring their own meals here to eat at the tables, although the whole carriage is deserted when I pass through. Second class is little different to first, but minus the air conditioning. Someone in second is playing music on an electronic device. The refrain goes: 'Everybody jump now! Everybody dance now! Everybody jump now! Whoa, whoa, whoa!'

  Not far away are two westerners, the only others on the train. I ask if they are tourists going to Jaffna. They are not. They work for Unicef, the intergovernmental organisation that acts on behalf of children. Their office is in Kilinochchi, about 40 miles south-east of Jaffna, where they will be disembarking. Una heads up Unicef in Sri Lanka, while her colleague Christian is chief of education.

  Unicef has a team of 65 in Sri Lanka and a budget of US$12 million; 25 per cent of children are 'malnourished or undernourished'; the maternity mortality rate is 3.4 per 1,000 births; and in the late 1990s more than 30,000 children were 'involved in sex favours, but it's cleared up now' – all of which is relayed to me at speed by Una. She is from Kilkenny in Ireland and is dressed in a colourful blouse that would have had Mark Twain's approval, with a butterfly brooch attached. She has glasses, short hair in a neat side parting and a wry sense of humour. Christian wears a white shirt and designer stubble. He is from Germany, and says little. They've been to Colombo to meet the education and health ministers as they want to get various programmes – fittingly for our setting – 'back on track'.

  Sri Lanka has a new government headed by President Maithripala Sirisena, a liberal-leaning politician who has replaced former president Rajapaksa, who was in power for ten years from 2005. Rajapaksa is accused by Sirisena of having overseen widespread corruption during his time in office. International human-rights groups also say that Rajapaksa gave the go-ahead to the indiscriminate shelling of Tamil civilians at the end of the civil war, allowed the torture of imprisoned Tamil Tigers and permitted the widespread harassment – and probably worse – of journalists critical of his rule. One of the biggest cases involves Prageeth Eknaligoda, a prominent writer and cartoonist who contributed to an anti-government website. He went missing in mysterious circumstances in 2010, and no one has heard of him since.

  This is what I know already. But before Una, Christian and I move on to politics, we keep the conversation to trains.

  'What do you think of the Queen of Jaffna?'

  'Very useful,' says Una. 'We used to go by road and it took ten hours. By train it's five hours. The roads are not bad, but they have heavy traffic.'

  However, she has a complaint: 'The toilets are clean here, but there are cockroaches, as I have just witnessed.'

  Una has a precise, no-nonsense manner. She has worked in Sri Lanka for 18 months.

  'Where were you posted before?'

  'Panama and West Africa: Togo and Sierra Leone. Thirteen years in West Africa,' she says.

  West Africa is in the middle of the Ebola crisis at the time of my visit. 'Are you glad you're in Sri Lanka now?'

  'Oh no, I wish I was out there to help,' she says.

  We pass a field of brown cows, each and every one with a small white bird on its back, poking about for insects. They make odd couples. As do Una and Christian.

  'It's a bit bumpy,' says Christian, piping up for a moment. He's referring to the track.

  '"It's lovely," is the correct UN answer,' Una swiftly cuts in.

  He falls silent once again.

  'This is a time of hope and change,' Una says, turning to the rapidly altering circumstances of the island. 'In times of change, children need to understand that change. They will lead the united, peaceful approach. If you don't address prejudice and ethnic suspicion by the age of ten or twelve, it's no good. We forget that children will be politicians when they grow up. But children don't vote so people don't focus on that. One hundred per cent of children in Sri Lanka go to school up to the age of fifteen: they're a perfect audience.'

  She pauses for a moment and looks out of the window. 'Wow, look at that over there.'

  Christian and I do. The sun has turned into a red ball, glowing through thick fog that hangs over the jungle. It's a beautiful sight – almost menacing in its raw, ruby intensity.

  One of Unicef's jobs is to help parents find children who went missing during the conflict with the Tamil Tigers. 'Many are tracing their kids, but most had been recruited into the LTTE,' says Una.

  LTTE stands for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The name 'Tamil Eelam' was given to land in the north and east of Sri Lanka that the Tamil Tigers hoped to take to create an independent state. The LTTE forcibly recruited many of their ranks, including children, creating much fear and hostility towards the rebels within the Tamil community itself.

  'They are most probably dead,' says Una. It is believed that up to 100,000 people died in the 26-year conflict.

  Many small children, I learn, were picked up in the street by other families during the confusion of the height of the troubles. As they were unable to speak their parents' names, they were adopted.

  'Every now and then DNA is used, and a child is found. The sad thing is that it gives people hope.' The reality is that such hope will be misplaced as most children were killed.

  This is just one of the many ongoing issues facing the Tamildominated parts of the country. Since the war ended in 2009, there have been huge upheavals in the north and east, as tens of thousands of people had been left homeless by the conflict. Most have since been resettled from refugee camps, although many homes are still under construction, so the return to 'normal' is far from complete.

  Una and Christian are travelling by Land Cruiser from Kilinochchi, which was once a Tamil Tiger stronghold, up to Jaffna later in the day. They have a meeting tomorrow with the chief minister of the northern province. They want to persuade him to end corporal punishment in schools, starting with making them 'smack free'.

  'Kids copy violence. If they think that hitting solves things, then they will hit,' says Una.

  Trying to draw him out a bit, I ask Christian where he worked before coming here.

  'Myanmar. Three years,' he says – and leaves it at that.

  'Whereabouts in Germany are you from?'

  'I did not live in Germany.'

  'Oh, where did you grow up?'

  'France and Switzerland.'

  And that's the end of that.

  I leave them as the sun is turning tangerine above a lake of pink and white lilies – and return to the party in Carriage A.

  Teetering termite mounds, long red-dirt roads, banana plantations, dogs that turn and howl at the big blue train as though still unused to this strange apparition so recently introduced to their lives – that's what's going on outside. Inside, my neighbours are standing up and chatting to one another as though they're at a social gathering in a living room.

  Sri Lanka's official name is the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. I flick through my copy of the Daily Mirror, picked up at Fort station, where the main story of the day comes from our destination. President Sirisena visited Jaffna yesterday to announce the return of some of the territory confiscated by the military from landowners in the north during the civil war – this land had been seized to create an area known as the Palaly High-Security Zone. Yet it is the language that Sirisena uses that stands out: 'Karl Marx has explained very clearly that the root cause of the fight between the landlords and the proletariat was the ownership of lands. Therefore, we politicians must pay our attention to resolve land issues all the time.'

  Back in the UK, if you put the Labour Party's difficult-to-work-out Jeremy Corbyn to one side, it is hard to imagine a mainstream politician going about
quoting Marx and referring to the proletariat – and it's a striking reminder of the 'democratic socialist' side of the country (Sirisena is a former member of the Communist Party of Ceylon). Travelling on the Queen of Jaffna, I feel as though I'm moving to the heart of the country's ongoing debate: the source of the stories that are making its front-page headlines.

  The ethnic make-up of Sri Lanka is thus: Tamils, of which the vast majority are Hindu, are about 11 per cent of the population; Sinhalese account for 75 per cent and are mainly Buddhist (Sirisena is Sinhalese and a practising Buddhist); about nine per cent are Muslim; and the remaining five per cent includes a mixture of people such as Indian Tamils, a distinct ethnic group brought to Sri Lanka to work by the British. There was already much Tamil–Sinhalese tension in the aftermath of British rule in 1948, but relations deteriorated in the mid 1950s when an act was passed making Sinhalese the official language, while failing to recognise the Tamil language; the Sinhalese majority had been fed up with the well-educated Tamil minority holding many positions of power in the civil service and universities, and this was their way of doing something about it. The act inflamed matters enormously.

  The next key moment came in 1958, when widespread antiTamil riots took place. Afterwards, tensions grew year by year, with open discussion about creating a separatist Tamil state. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam came into being in 1976, led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, who had previously overseen another group named the Tamil New Tigers, founded in the early 1970s. The civil war is said to have begun in 1983, after the LTTE attacked an army convoy in Jaffna, killing 13 soldiers. The backlash against this led to riots in which more than 3,000 Tamils died. At the same time, relations between the Tamils and the Muslim community were also deteriorating, reaching a low when Prabhakaran expelled 24,000 Muslims from Jaffna. He also ordered the 1989 assassination of India's Rajiv Gandhi, whom he believed to be anti Tamil. Prabhakaran's death in May 2009 came at the end of the civil war, when the LTTE had been pushed to a tiny strip of land on the north-east coast. Hundreds of civilians caught in the crossfire died in the final days of the conflict there.

  The treatment of the Tamil minority – which is the majority of the population in the north and parts of the east coast – is seen as key to the future of Sri Lanka. In reply to the president, Mr C. V. Wigneswaran, the chief minister of the north (who Una and Christian are going to meet), is quoted in the local Daily Mirror as saying: 'Our people have suffered nearly thirty years and have lived at so-called refugee camps and welfare centres as paupers. They are crying for their legitimate lands to be vested in them and unfortunately the process is extremely slow. The paramount duty of the government is to reconstruct not only the buildings and infrastructure but the pride and dignity of the northern people as there was a time where schools, temples and hospitals were bulldozed.' Not enough land is being returned, and it is not 'proper for the armed forces to cultivate lands that belong to people, forcibly depriving their livelihood'.

  Meanwhile the Daily Mirror's editorial is not pulling its punches over the issue of corruption in Sri Lanka: 'President Sirisena pronounced the end of a party political era where politics had become a big business like heroin or liquor and most politicians came in to plunder the resources of millions of suffering Sri Lankans. President Sirisena said the principles of the new era would be good governance and democracy, accountability, transparency and social justice with the politicians being aware that they are not kings, lords and masters but feet-washing servants of the people. Anyone who did not or could not live according to these values and principles must quit the government and go into whatever profit making or criminal business they desire.'

  A great deal of politics… as the Queen of Jaffna rattles northwards.

  Meanwhile, elsewhere, an 'Ayurvedic massage clinic' in Mount Lavinia had been closed down as it turned out to be a brothel; a bus driver had been suspended for driving through a gap at a level crossing and narrowly missing the Galle express train; 54 fishermen from Tamil Nadu had been arrested for fishing in Sri Lankan waters; and David Beckham is reported as saying: 'I let Victoria dress me ninety-nine per cent of the time.'

  I look out of the window, where the jungle is thick with vines; it's easy to understand how the Tamil Tigers operated undercover for so long. A startling bird with a blue-and-red body and blackand-white-tipped wings soars by (I later learn this is a Sri Lankan magpie). White butterflies in their hundreds flicker above a paddy field. And I try to imagine living in a country where major papers refer to their politicians as 'feet-washing servants of the people'. I think I like the idea of that.

  Beyond Anuradhapura station – where a lot of people get off, not a lot of people get on, and there's a Priests' Waiting Room – I become acquainted with the party people of Carriage A.

  Raj Varatharaj sits down next to me. He has heard me talking to a man in the row in front who has been telling me all about his brother, who lives in Milton Keynes and sells 'whisky, beer: he has shop'. Raj seems to have organised the party in Carriage A. He lives near Los Angeles and is of Tamil origin, visiting Jaffna with his wife, children and relatives to attend a wedding. He grew up in Jaffna and is a civil engineer responsible for work on bridges and harbours in California. He studied engineering at university in Sri Lanka before winning a scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. 'My brother lives in Switzerland, it is so lovely in Switzerland… when I went to live in Oklahoma, I was so disappointed.'

  There are four Tamil families that are joining up for the wedding, one of which is from Australia, where the couple are to live. It is an arranged marriage.

  Raj loves the Queen of Jaffna and remembers travelling on it as a child, before the service was shut down in 1990.

  'The whole war is over,' he says. 'Now we can plan ahead. Tamils had forgotten about pre-planning their travel. We could not say: "We will be here, and we will do this on that date. I'm going on the train and we can do that." Now there are trains, it is different.'

  In other words: the wedding in Jaffna would have been impossible without the reopening of the railway. The marriage had been postponed especially so the group could travel together.

  Raj looks American: jeans, shades, polo shirt, gold Casio watch, short back and sides. He says that being on the other side of the globe has allowed him to regard the troubles in Sri Lanka with clarity: 'There are factions on both sides. There are so many bad memories of each other. From the US I can see this: you guys are crazy, if you really want to move forward and forget about the past, don't be severe, forget about the hatred of each other, but don't forget the lessons to learn.'

  A stone cracks into the bottom of the carriage. We are on a bouncy section of track, with bumps and jolts. The jungle is even thicker. We pass a military barracks; it has a castellated wall and two soldiers stand guard at an entrance facing the railway. We are beyond Kilinochchi, where Una and Christian disembarked. I wonder whether this is part of the Palaly High-Security Zone.

  Raj discusses the ongoing effects of the civil war: 'There are 80,000–90,000 war widows in the north and the east. It's a massive problem. There are lots of young women without a husband – some with children.' He pauses and gazes into the jungle, as though imagining the former rebels who camped out there.

  Raj is concerned that one day violence might erupt again. However, overall he has an optimistic outlook, while remaining realistic: 'Winning the hearts and minds of the people is going to be difficult. People are still bitter now, but there is more hope for reconciliation.'

  Jani, Raj's wife, joins us. She is in a Twain-friendly pink dress and is smiling broadly, with a red bindi on her forehead. She also grew up in Jaffna. 'Everything is perfect now,' she says, referring to the country's troubles and the reopening of the Colombo–Jaffna line. 'It's wonderful: looking out of the window. The kids don't value or notice. They just watch Harry Potter on their iPads.'

  We have our pictures taken together, exchange emails; Jani recommends the Mango restaurant in Jaffna; and
we arrive at our final stop.

  Up north

  Jaffna

  Jaffna station is modern, naturally. Most of it was blown up during the conflict. Adverts for mobile phones and banks are pasted on walls. A display case shows the bombed-out shell of the original station: mouldering walls with bullet and shell marks, frames without windows and tall weeds on the track. This stands next to a picture of the shiny white station: DREAM BECAME A REALITY.

  I have a couple of days in the city, before travelling by plane from the Palaly High-Security Zone's airport to the east coast to stay at a beach resort operating in an area once controlled by the Tamil Tigers. Yes, I know, planes are bad, trains are good, but I want to see how the Queen of Jaffna is playing a part in bringing together new 'tourist areas'; some tour operators are already offering train-and-plane options in Sri Lanka's north and east.

  So what do you do after catching the train to Jaffna?

  You probably stay at the Jaffna Heritage Hotel. It's early days for tourism in the city, with just a handful of hotels and little pandering to overseas tourists. The Jaffna Heritage Hotel is the exception (for now), on a street with a run of non-governmental organisations and UN offices. Plain rooms with good air conditioning, a small pool that no one uses in a garden with a lawn, a little lounge with sketches depicting local life ('a typical Jaffna woman in her traditional appearance') and a waiter who knows how to find you a beer and have it taken to your room in a paper bag (even though alcohol, which is legal in Jaffna, is not on the hotel's menu at the behest of the owner). The alternative, for the serious rail enthusiast, is the Green Grass Hotel, which has rooms overlooking Jaffna station and serves a highly recommended crab curry.