Pigeon Island National Park

Pigeon Island National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Pigeon Island is a pair of tiny rocky islands a kilometre off the long beach of Nilaveli, fifteen kilometres north of Trincomalee on the east coast of Sri Lanka, and it should not be confused with Pigeon Valley in Cappadocia or the town of Pigeon Forge in Tennessee, which share its first word. It is the country's best-known snorkelling site, and the visit is simple. Boats leave from the beach in front of the wildlife department's ticket office at Nilaveli, where the fees are paid: an entrance ticket per person, several times higher for foreigners than for Sri Lankans, plus a service charge, tax, and a boat fee that is shared among the passengers, up to about eight, so that a couple on their own pay noticeably more per head than a group;

hotels and the dive centres along the beach sell the same trip as a package with masks, fins and a guide who knows where the turtles and the sharks are. The crossing takes ten to fifteen minutes, and visitors are generally given about two hours on the island. The snorkelling is done straight off the beach of the larger island, on the shallow reef in the channel between the two and around the rocks at either end. The dive schools at Nilaveli and Uppuveli run two-tank dives at the reefs and rocks around the island and at other sites along the coast, and beginners' courses. Three rules matter: do not stand on or touch the coral, which thousands of careless feet have damaged in the shallows; wear a shirt, since the sun is fierce; and bring water, as there is nothing on the island but a ranger's hut and some shade.

Visiting Pigeon Island National Park: what you will see

The islands were made a sanctuary in 1963, to protect the blue rock pigeons that nest in the crevices of their granite and gave them their name, and were declared a national park in 2003, the seventeenth in Sri Lanka and one of only three marine parks, covering about 471 hectares, almost all of it sea, within a larger protected reef area. The larger island is some two hundred metres long and forty wide, a hump of boulders and scrubby trees rising to about forty-four metres, with a small beach of white coral sand and fragments facing the smaller island, which is bare rock; in colonial times the British navy used them for gunnery practice. The reef around them, about two hundred metres long and a hundred wide, is one of the best remaining in Sri Lanka, because it largely escaped the bleaching of 1998 that killed most of the coral on the south and west coasts: more than a hundred species of coral have been recorded, dominated by branching and table Acropora, with Montipora, brain corals and soft corals around the rocks, and some three hundred species of reef fish, parrotfish, butterflyfish, angelfish, surgeonfish, moray eels and clownfish in their anemones. The animals that people come hoping to see, and generally do, are the juvenile blacktip reef sharks, a metre long and entirely harmless, which patrol the sandy shallows at the ends of the island, and the hawksbill and green turtles that feed on the reef. The tsunami of December 2004 struck this coast hard and damaged parts of the reef, and the long civil war, which kept visitors away from the east until 2009, protected it; the boom in visitors since has done more harm than either, and a second bleaching in 2016 and the crown-of-thorns starfish have added to it, so that the shallow coral nearest the beach is largely rubble while the deeper reef remains fine.

Pigeon Island National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open daily from about 8 am to 5 pm, with the last boats out in the early afternoon. The east coast has the opposite season to the rest of Sri Lanka's beaches: the sea is calm and clear from about April to October, with May to September the best, and from November to March the north-east monsoon brings swell, rain and poor visibility, and the boats often do not run at all.

Go on the first boat of the morning, before eight if possible, when the water is calmest, the sharks are in the shallows and the day-trippers from Trincomalee have not arrived; weekends and Sri Lankan holidays are crowded. Allow half a day. Nilaveli and Uppuveli beaches are the bases, Trincomalee's Koneswaram temple and Fort Frederick twenty minutes south, whale and dolphin watching trips leave from the same beaches from March to August, and the hot wells of Kanniya are nearby.