Kuakata is eighteen kilometres of grey sand in southern Bangladesh, bulging south into the Bay of Bengal on a curve wide enough to hold both ends of the day. The double act is seasonal. The sun has to rise far enough south to clear open water, which it does from November to early February; by June it comes up well to the north-east, behind the trees. The sunset never fails. On any clear evening the sun drops straight into the bay behind the fishing fleet, and if you walk west toward Lebur Char as the light goes, the wet sand hands the colours back. The name means the dug well, for the wells the Rakhine sank after landing here from Arakan in 1784 and finding nothing to drink. They are a minority on their own beach now, with villages inland that keep their language, script and monasteries; Misripara's holds a seated Buddha of nine metres, the largest in Bangladesh.
At low tide the sea pulls back and leaves you a wide, hard flat. Buffalo are walked down from the villages to feed on seaweed the water has stranded, and one standing alone on the wet sand, horns against the water, is the picture people carry home. Thousands of red crabs come out on the quiet stretches and spread in moving sheets across the flats; when you walk toward one, the whole sheet drops into its burrows at the first vibration, then rises again behind you. They had nearly gone from the busy sand, crushed in their burrows by motorbikes and jeeps, and poured back over the full eighteen kilometres when the traffic stopped in 2020. Through the cool months olive ridley turtles nest on the quiet chars, and each Kartik full moon Hindu pilgrims camp here in thousands for Rash Mela. At the eastern end the tide has come into the trees. Bleached trunks and torn-out root plates lie scattered where the shelter belt used to stand, and about 250 metres of shoreline has gone here in five years: those fallen trees are the plantation itself, not storm wreckage.