St Martin’s Island

Recovered from Facebook Notes, posted Sep 17, 2008, written even before that about a memory from roughly 4 years before that. Reading it again, I can see my writing back then was influenced by all the Enid Blyton I read as a child.

We were at Cox’s Bazaar on an extremely rare family vacation, for just 3 days, but I wasn’t too sure that I’d enjoy it. The beach was too crowded to have fun in and hundreds of picnickers had parked their buses on this field and each bus was loudly playing different types of music, and the combination was extremely unpleasant to listen to.

Then the vacation plan changed. We would be spending the remaining 2 days at St. Martin’s Island. There was a package programme that would take us there on a steamer called Keari Sindabad. It was a 2-hour ride from Teknaf, across River Naf and then the Bay of Bengal.

It’s not easy to get tired looking out of the steamers, whether it’s the water you’re looking at, or the green hills of Teknaf, or the misty outlines of mountains in Myanmar.

After getting down from the steamer we had to cross this flimsy dangerous-looking wooden bridge, but it was kinda’ fun, actually. We made our way across the sand and got to this place with a lot of shops and a lot of rickshaw-vans were waiting on a cement path to take the passengers to a hotel. We rode through the village, which wasn’t any different from any other village, except it has way too many coconut trees.

The Hotel Obokash wasn’t any luxury hotel, but it was without inconveniences. The best part was it looked right into the sea-beach.

I’ve never been to a rocky beach before, and I found this one too fantastic for words. The whole beach was strewn with rocks, some of them surrounded with little pools of water. I kept mostly to the line of rocks that ran into the sea. You have to be really careful or the rock may give way under your feet and you’ll fall into the water and get a few bruises from other rocks. I went and stood on a rock sticking above the water and felt the waves hitting against my feet. The view was amazing. Far out in the sea, the white-topped waves were racing with each other over the bright aqua water. It doesn’t sound that great when expressed in words, but it honestly is an amazing sight, especially because I got the sideward view of the waves’ race. I mean, the waves weren’t coming towards me; they were going towards another beach on my right.

From the hotel you could see the lake. It really isn’t a lake, it’s more like a pool, but it’s totally cut off from the sea. But I heard that when the tide comes, water from the sea flows into the lake. The lake continues into a river. Well, if you look up the common features all rivers have, then this cannot be classified as one; but it looks just like any meandering river, and beside the river are vegetable farms.

Just in front of the hotel is this restaurant that had really good fish, and just outside it were a few circular sheds made with hay and it had huge tables for the whole party to eat in.

That afternoon, I walked miles and miles down the beach, collecting shells, which are found in abundance. It becomes like a habit, once you start, you can’t stop picking them up. The tide was coming and the sea was getting louder. The sun soon disappeared behind the clouds, and I had so wanted to see it “go down into the sea”. It was way after sunset when I got to the hotel, then my father told us his plan.

He had heard from somewhere that turtles come up every night to lay eggs on the beach. Now, that’s a fib. They come up only once in a while, but my dad didn’t know that. He was determined to go down the beach to a place where these people collected the eggs to protect them from the dogs. Our local juvenile guide Alam would be taking us there.

A night walk on the beach had its appeal. To get to the beach, you have to go straight from the hotel and climb a hillock and then straight down into the sand. As I got “straight down into the sand”, I got a shock. The world suddenly got all dark. You couldn’t see a thing. The bad news was we had a really small flashlight with us that was nearly out of batteries. Anyway, that was a totally different experience for me; it was so – unreal. Imagine yourself walking down the beach, the sand sifting through your sandals, the wind cutting into your face. You can’t see a thing – except the stars. And the stars are closer than ever. They don’t seem like stars, they seem like a myriad of lanterns in the sky. On one side are the dark outlines of coconut trees, and on the other side, the deafening roaring and splashing of the sea. Oh, and you have to be careful not to step on any crabs, or fall down a hole in the sand. It seemed as if we had wandered away from time and from our world. You have to BE there to know what it’s like. It seems as if you are someplace where nothing is impossible.

When we got to the place where turtle eggs are bred, we got to know the turtles weren’t likely to lay eggs that day. Oh well, what does it matter? I was still too dazed from the walk. But we got to know a lot about the turtles and the island. The island is built on the rocks, and if the local people continue breaking away rocks for building purposes, the island would be in big trouble. People are also illegally breaking away coral from the sea and that would cause ecological imbalance.

Anyway, after we climbed over the hillock, we were back to reality and we enjoyed a meal of lobster and fish barbecue in one of the hay sheds.

I slept right beside the window. We had to wake up early for we’d be visiting the coral island. I pulled aside the curtains and saw that the beach was gone. The sea was so much nearer and it was so – blue. I changed my mind; the sea is definitely better during high tide. True, the rocky beach is really cool, but during high tide it’s so much more beautiful. I went up to the rooftop to get a good look. Then I saw the small channel through which the seawater flowed into the lake.

The coral island (probal dweep) is called Chhera Dweep (although the sign read Chira Dweep), because it is connected to the main island by a line of rocks that get submerged during high tide; as if the coral island gets “torn” from the main island. The coral island wasn’t such an amazing place, except that this was a far rockier beach and we got to collect coral. No, we didn’t break them from the reef; these were swept ashore by the waves.

Anyway, the ride to the island rocked. Seriously. We went there in a steamboat and the boat bobbed up and down, up and down. If you stand on the bow, you’ll have to hold on (or face the consequences) and it’s kinda’ like those ‘thrilling rides’ in theme parks.

The view was great. In the distance you could see the green trees, surrounded by a yellow expanse that was the beach, surrounded by black rocks, surrounded by the clear aqua and sapphire water. You could only faintly see the corals from above the water surface.

When we got back, the Keari Sindabad had arrived with a new batch of tourists. We had only enough time to pack up and have lunch. And so the time came to leave, back to the boring old hotel in Cox’s Bazaar, but the thought of going home the next day cheered me up. I enjoyed every minute of my being in St. Martin’s Island. I left behind nothing there, but took with me some cuts and bruises from the rocks and some unforgettable memories.