It was 5am, just 4 hours after the airport finally dropped off my lost luggage at our Airbnb rental in Colombo, and just 15 minutes before we were to board a 7-hour train from Colombo to Jaffna, the northern most city in Sri Lanka. After our brief, but efficiently utilized, 20 hours of living it up in Colombo, it was time to put our foot on the clutch and get ready to switch gears. Jaffna sits at about 50 kilometers from the southern tip of India and was one of the hardest hit areas of the bloody decades long civil war. As a matter of fact, the very train I was sitting on had barely been open a year after being shut down for over 20 years, effectively cutting off the north from the rest of the country.